24.08.2026
If a picture is worth a thousand words, a prototype is worth a thousand meetings
Until recently, building something interactive enough to have a conversation and drive decisions could take days or weeks. You might need a designer, a developer, or enough budget to make the exercise worthwhile.
A rough prototype can now be produced in hours, sometimes minutes. Which means the threshold for saying “instead of discussing it, shall we test it?” has dropped a long way.
These might be small design decisions. Or they might be much bigger questions about how the service should actually work.
What should the workflow be? Where does the hand-off happen? What information does someone need at that point? Should the status be here or there? Should it say Assessment or In progress? Icons or words?
Or perhaps you want to get ahead of User Acceptance Testing and test an idea before anyone has burnt through budgeted hours and built the real thing.
When it’s this cheap to make an idea tangible, there’s less reason to keep talking about an imagined version of it.
It doesn’t have to be finished, or even particularly beautiful. Just enough of it to make the conversation real.
The prototype below is deliberately simple. It’s a fictional clinical worklist. You can rearrange the columns, change workflow statuses and switch between different ways of displaying assessments.
Have a play.
Move Workflow status somewhere else. Change a patient’s state. Decide whether five little icons are genuinely clearer than five words.
Some of these are tiny decisions. Others can reshape a workflow. Either way, making them tangible gives people something real to react to before they become embedded in the service.
People are much better at reacting to something they can see, click and disagree with than a box on a process map.
Latest insights
If a picture is worth a thousand words, a prototype is worth a thousand meetings
Until recently, building something interactive enough to have a conversation and drive decisions could take days or weeks. You might need a designer, a developer, or enough budget to make the exercise worthwhile. A rough prototype can now be produced in hours, sometimes minutes. Which means the threshold for saying “instead of discussing it, shall…
Keystream Group and Keystream Consulting have been successfully awarded places on the Crown Commercial Service G-Cloud 15 Framework.
We’re delighted to announce that both Keystream Group and Keystream Consulting have been successfully awarded places on the Crown Commercial Service G-Cloud 15 Framework. The awards provide public sector organisations with an established procurement route to access Keystream’s specialist digital and technology support capabilities through Keystream Group, alongside a growing range of digital transformation and…
Keystream awarded a place on ESPO’s Strategic HR & Recruitment Services framework
Keystream has been awarded a place on the ESPO 3S_26 Strategic HR & Recruitment Services framework, providing public sector organisations with another compliant route to access our specialist recruitment expertise. Through the framework, organisations can work with Keystream to access digital, data, technology and commercial professionals across permanent, interim and contract recruitment. This will support…
I’m taking a break
If you’re anything like me, having a break is…hard. The succession of problem-solving tasks is what I like about my day-to-day work, but I’d be lying if I didn’t occasionally come back from a break with five more things to sort and think: “what was I working on gain?” “When you get interrupted in a task, take 20 seconds to…
Digital Transformation Is Building the Bridge. Who Is Helping People Cross It?
A few years ago, I tried to teach my mum how to use a smartphone. What I thought would take a few minutes turned into weeks of explaining, reassuring, and troubleshooting. Every new feature seemed intimidating, and every mistake reinforced a fear that she might “break” something. At the time, I thought I was teaching…
Marginal Gains Could Save Lives: What the NHS Learned from Formula 1
Across the NHS, hospitals are facing increasing pressure not only from rising patient demand, but from the growing complexity of delivering safe, efficient care within constrained operational environments. Theatre capacity, staffing shortages and delayed patient flow are all placing systems under strain, where even small inefficiencies can have significant consequences. Minutes lost during patient handovers,…
AI in Higher Education: What’s Actually Changing?
There has been a noticeable rise in conversations around AI roles across Higher Education over the past year. Universities are increasingly hiring for AI specialists, data leaders, automation experts, and digital transformation professionals. But despite the recent attention, AI itself is not new to the sector. In reality, many of the technologies and skillsets now…
Saving Pennies Now Could Cost You Pounds Later: Why Data Should Drive Decision Making
Across the UK and internationally, ambulance, police and fire services are facing increasing pressures not only from rising demand, but from a quieter and more structural issue: vehicle availability. With c.8-10% of public sector fleets off the road at any given time, a growing proportion are ageing beyond their optimal operational life, leading to more…
Optimising Records Management: A Conversation with Harry Pettet
Reflecting on my time at Rewired, the opportunities that can be achieved by the NHS from maximising frontline productivity (FP) are increasingly clear to me. In line with the FP programme mandate, I saw a clear shift in focus from EPR roll-out to instead a wider scope which included championing digital enablement and adoption via…
Paperless? Not Without Paper First.
Sitting at my 200-year-old desk, checking a 120-year-old pocket watch, and recapping a century-old fountain pen, while dictating this into my phone and letting AI help shape it into a blog. The irony isn’t lost on me. Just before writing this, I spoke to someone who’s spent years focused on the problem, not the solution….