This slide deck was created for a Meetup with Coding Black Females and 8th Light's designers. Organizations use design to leverage their goals, and design-led processes help ensure that the technological solution will resonate and engage with its users. The tools designers use and the challenges they solve go outside of software. The design thinking process follows six stages that are broken into three themes. Designers empathize and define the problem in order to understand the problem’s full context; they ideate and prototype to explore potential solutions; and they test and implement to help the solution materialize.

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Develop. Create. Innovate with Designers.
Exploring the Critical Partnership Between Developers and Designers

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We craft software that
unlocks human potential.
ABOUT 8TH LIGHT

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OUR PRINCIPLES
We believe software is a craft born out of practice.
Design for people
We lead with a
human-centered approach
to software, resulting in
products that are intuitive,
approachable, and
delightful.
Inspire through education
We don’t just deliver code,
we share the skills and best
practices that enable
clients to grow their
business through a culture
of continual learning.
Build for the future
We develop software that
provides long-term
sustainability, performance,
and differentiation with
clients, empowering teams
in transformative ways.

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Our Capabilities

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Software
Evolution
Helping guide clients to
understand, evaluate, plan,
build, and deploy
next-level software
solutions.
Designed
Experiences
Uniquely designed and
engineered solutions that
engage, inform, and
enable users, and
ultimately drive adoption
through useful and
kickass experiences.
Organizational
Development
Inspiration, mentorship,
and support for client
teams improving their
ability to build and
maintain a competitive
edge.
Digital
Transformation
Ongoing software and
technology expertise
helping organizations
better meet their
objectives through expert
guidance and modeling
best practices.
Crafting digital solutions, helping move ideas forward.

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Human-centered, designed software.
● User Experience Design: human-centered design
led activities uncovering needs and insights from
people to inspire new opportunities for design
that are desirable, feasible, and viable.
● UI Design: creating cohesive visual and interactive
components that are usable, accessible, feasible,
and engaging.
Visual Design: applying typography, color, imagery, and
messaging that best serve the needs of our solutions and
our client brands.
UI Implementation: faithfully translating the design
direction from mockups and prototypes into scalable
production releases.

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DESIGN THINKING PRINCIPLES
IDEO’s Innovation Diagram

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DESIGN THINKING PROCESS
https://www.nngroup.com/articles/design-thinking/

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Collaborating in
Design Thinking
and Agile

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Software built through an iterative, agile process.
● Iterations: Specializing in breaking large systems
into composable parts, we can deliver in short,
weekly iterations, resulting in rapid feedback
cycles from product stakeholders.
● TDD: Driving our development with Unit and
Acceptance Tests helps us avoid waste, ensuring
that every single line moves us closer toward a
system that behaves how you intended.
● Pair Programming: When we collaborate, we
share knowledge and build skills, which promotes
continuous momentum, efficient problem-solving,
breaks down silos, and builds cross-functional
teams.
Continuous Integration: We continuously integrate code to
ensure delivery exceeds expectations, while adopting a
“ship anytime” mentality that deploys a working system at
any iteration.
Product Learning: Each line of code tells us something
about the final product, and every product becomes more
concrete as we receive feedback from product
stakeholders and customers.
Software Delivery: Subscribing to Accelerate researchers'
metrics — delivery lead time, deployment frequency, mean
time to restore, and change fail percentage — helps us
improve what matters most.

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Design thinking and agile development are complementary
approaches that work together to create products that meet
user needs and deliver value.
In an agile methodology, the development process is iterative and collaborative
with frequent feedback loops to ensure the product is meeting user needs, on time
and under budget.
Design thinking on the other hand is the a human-centered approach to problem
solving that focuses on understanding the problem space to produce insights that
drive ideation and prototyping, and ultimately business value.
DESIGN THINKING AND AGILE DEVELOPMENT

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Q+A

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Thank you
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