Customers, suppliers, employees, and other stakeholders are carrying out complex, collaborative business activities through new online channels that are yielding increases in revenues and productivity. However, corporate IT organizations are often challenged to design portal solutions with compelling and effective user interfaces and robust (and often complex) business functionality. The problem only worsens as portals grow and become increasingly unwieldy.

In response to these challenges, and leveraging LDS's Informed Design philosophy to optimize design tradeoffs, LDS employs specific best practices.

Explicit Design

We strive to make explicit all the important elements of our portal designs. We utilize standard design modeling tools and practices where possible, such as the UML. We also extend those tools and practices with our own, where required, to address areas not adequately handled by standard approaches.

Pattern-Based Design

We leverage patterns in both standard and innovative ways. For instance, we use patterns to describe presentation concepts in terms of presentation elements in order to capture those common and recurring structures.

Model-Based Architecture

One way we separate concerns in our design space is to separate presentation functionality and behavior from the technologies used to implement them. By using model-based architecture as the organizing framework, we leverage models as the medium to describe design concepts and patterns. Model-Driven Architecture (MDA), which comes from the Object Management Group (OMG), is a particular formalization of this design approach. Our portal designs employ both a Logical Model (platform independent view) and an Implementation Model (platform-specific view). Transformation defines how to map from the Logical Model to the Implementation Model.