Whilst working on ‘Sending Money to Prisoners’ for the Ministry of Justice we needed to test whether our new payment instructions make sense to citizens.
Previously we made a mock-up of the GOV.UK mainstream guidance page and redirected users in a testing scenario to this page.
Based on findings during usability testing, we would iterate this mock-up between sessions. These changes can rapidly improve our service.
There are many ways to serve prototypes. I regularly use GitHub Pages as it’s free and public as soon as I push to the repo. All I need to do is make sure the default branch is called gh-pages.
GitHub has another really useful feature; the ability to edit HTML as Markdown through their website interface. Markdown is very useful for editing content of webpages without writing any code.
I thought this could be a much slicker process if all our prototypes. By combining the Web based editor of GitHub and Markdown with the hassle free hosting on GitHub Pages, we effectively create a content management system.
Of course there’s a good chance many have done this before. I searched around for other potential solutions. The Government Digital Services of course have already done something very similar called ‘Prototyping’ which almost does exatly what I wanted but without harnessing the power of GitHub Pages. This leaves the hosting efforts to a techy who has to deploy it somewhere else.
I created GitHub Prototyper with a README directed at non tech people. All you need is a GitHub account.
Jekyll Front Matter
GitHub Pages renders Markdown via Jekyll. Jekyll uses something called ‘front matter’. With this you can set some options for your page. At the very least you must select a ‘layout’.
Other layout templates can easily be added by saving an HTML file in the _layouts directory and adding some Liquid tags.