Bradley Wood's Liferay Tips

As a preview for AlloyUI was just released (together with the new website) I took the opportunity to have another episode about the UI layer. Luckily two members of the core team, Eduardo Lundgren via Staff

test

I am very excited to announce that as of today, all Liferay community members can now create and maintain their own blogs on liferay.com! Wooo!! This was announced near the end of the A Day of Liferay, and has been on the TODO list for a while. The problem has always been how to maintain the quality of content on liferay.com, as blogs are generally considered to be a more reliable source of information about Liferay, and are generally expected to be of higher quality than your typical stream-of-conciousness found in other publishing areas like the community forums.

Blog Streams

Every community member’s blog is maintained in their Profile (more on this later). What follows is a description of how all of our blog posts are aggregated and visualized on the community site:

The first important point is that we will start with two separate (visually) blog streams - the Staff Blog and the Community Blog. As you guessed, the Community Blog is for topics by and for the community. Anyone can post here, including Liferay staffers, and will do so more often than not. The Staff Blog is for posts by Liferay staffers that may have a more general target audience than just our community. As an example, Ray Auge would post his most recent work on OSGi to the Community Blog. Caris Chan would likely post her blog about Liferay’s new offices in France to the Staff Blog.

There are three areas where these streams are evident:

1. On the Community Dashboard - “Recent Bloggers” remains on the dashboard, but each post is further decorated with a gray Staff tag for Liferay staffers, and each post is categorized according to which stream it appears in.
2. On the Community Bloggers Page - Each stream is separately shown. In addition, a list of individual bloggers appears on the right, for bloggers both on and off of liferay.com, sorted by total number of posts, with Liferay staffers receiving the Staff tag. If you maintain an external blog centered around Liferay and wish to have it listed, fill out the form!
3. On an individual blog post - The stream in which the post appears is tagged, along with a tag for Liferay staffers.

Creating your Blog

At Liferay, we drink our own champagne, so you’ll be using the Liferay Blogs Portlet to enter your blogs.

To start off, we are going to ask that if you wish to blog that you manually request it. We will never refuse to enable blogging for anyone (unless you don’t appear to be a human), but do not want a flood of spammy posts clogging up the system. To get things started, we have enabled blogging for the vast majority of you already (over 500 community members), that have done even a very small amount of activity in the last 12 months, so chances are it’s already turned on for you. So go check your profile to see if you have a Blog link, before requesting it, by checking if you have the “Blog” link on your liferay.com profile.

To create a new blog, navigate to Places -> User Profile:

you will land on your personal (private) “Home” page.  Next, click Profile:

and then click Blog (if you do not see a Blog link, request to get upgraded!):

To add a new blog entry, click on (yep, you guessed it):  You will be presented with a WYSIWYG editor in which to enter content. Each post is sanitized to remove potentially dangerous content that clever folks might try to enter via the “source” mode, such as javascript, IFrames to other sites (however, embedded gists are allowed!), and other questionable CSS tricks.

You can save your blog as a Draft, and come back later to work on it, or just click Publish to publish!  Once you publish, your post should immediately appear in the Community Stream as described above. You can always come back and edit your entries, or delete them if you wish.

External Blogs

I know that many of you actively maintain your own blog off of liferay.com. If you wish to have your blog listed on the Community Blogs page, you can also request this via the external blog listing request page. That list is constructed by looking at the top 50 liferay.com bloggers (ranked by # of posts), and then external blogs are randomly inserted.

Tips and Tricks

• You can include uploaded images in your blogs by clicking the Image button, and uploading to your personal space on liferay.com.
• You can use certain CSS classes like callout to make images have rounded corners and shadows, etc. Go look at old blogs and use your favorite web page inspector to discover items.
• You can include gists (code snippets) using the ‘Embed’ option, and cutting/pasting the necessary javascript. This is the only kind of js allowed in your blog.

Blogger Policies

Blogging has been around forever, as have the written and unwritten rules, so this should not be new to any of you. Here are some of the written rules:

• Be courtous and respectful. Don’t use foul language, don’t be mean, don’t disrespect, don’t hate, don’t pre-judge, etc.
• Don’t post advertisements for your business or post job offers.
• Check your syntax and spelling. No one will take u srsly if u write like a txt msg to your bf.
• Don’t use your blog to post questions about Liferay that belong in the forums, unless you already have an answer and wish to educate. Blogs are for well-formed thoughts about a particular subject, not for getting help connecting Liferay to your corporate LDAP server.
• Cite your sources, don’t use copyrighted content without permission, give credit where credit is due.
• Be sure to read and respond to follow-up comments.
• If you have not yet added a profile picture, please do so before blogging. Seeing a list of anonymous faces in the blog stream is just sad :)
• No tricks! (Such as continuously updating your entry’s Display Date so that your blog is always at the top of the list)

There are more, and I’m sure I left a few out. I really hope this can be a great, free, open resource for all of us, so please play nice :) All blogs and posts are subject to deletion and with no warning if you violate these rules, but you’ll probably get a warning first.

Have fun, I know it’s been a long time coming, and I can’t wait to see what kinds of interesting posts our community has in store!

Acknowledgements

Giving credit where credit is due! Amos Fong led the implementation team, and David Miyabe did the design. I acted as Chief Pestering Officer on behalf of our community.

Earlier this week we wrapped up A Day of Liferay - a 24 hour epic  trip around the globe to meet our amazing community and get to know more about their interests and work they do on and around Liferay and other open source projects. I want to personally thank everyone who took time out of their day to participate - it was great to see the diversity of people we have in our little corner of open source, and hear about what they’re up to! I had a lot of fun doing it, and learned a lot, and hope you did to!

On the A Day of Liferay page, I have added a complete index of links for each of the significant parts of the broadcast (or you can spend the next 24 hours watching the broadcast in its entirety :) ).

Also, for those that won stuff (shirts, pi’s, etc). Rest assured you will be notified next week to arrange for you to recieve your hard-earned prizes! Now, where’s my 10 million-gram mega-sugary Cachaça? 

I wanted to let you know that I plan on talking about the resources importer and some new features added.

Join me at 6:00pm PST

Not long until the Day of Liferay - I’ll have 30 minutes to fill, and this is what I intend to cover:

A part of my job is in presales, answering all kinds of questions about what Liferay can or cannot do. Some features are almost there, but require a bit of custom development. Now when I reassure customers that this change is actually not that deep, and easy to maintain, I’m doing this before we build a trust relationship (after all, it’s presales and customers easily assume you rather overpromise)

I’m planning to demonstrate a few POC plugins that I stumbled upon when I was wondering myself how easy it would be to add certain features. This involves

• Extending the Blogs Portlet to be able to host podcasts
• Rediscovering drag&drop hints that indicate dropzones in Layout templates (for arranging portlets on the page)
• Assisting in the translation process
• Making a portlet’s performance reports well visible
• and others, maybe we get to some interactivity here

Also, you might have realized that the publication frequency for Radio Liferay continues to be low - sorry for that. I’d like to cover more external content - talk to actual users and know about their work with Liferay. For this I’d like to collect pointers, feedback and ideas on how to continue with this format. Any volunteers?

Lastly, I’m constantly collecting Well Hidden Features. If you have any that you find worth mentioning, please bring them with you. They might be obvious for you, but eye-opening for others.

See you Wednesday, 10:30 CEST, 8:30 UTC, I’m working hard to regain my voice until then.

These days I have been pushing all the OSGi stuff through the review process so we have already got some of the work in the master branch. Ray has written a really good blog post about using the Apache Felix Gogo console inside Liferay and he has already explained some of the benefits of our current work so I am not going to explain it here again.

We are still going through the peer review process so, at the time of this writing, some of the features could not be in the master branch yet. Anyway, we can still get many benefits and write powerfull applications which can exploit some of the benefits wich OSGi brings to us. In order to illustrate the previous statement, let’s write a small, and extensible, metrics application.

The metrics core system

• Declaring our Metrics manager as a component (OSGi service)
• Get/UnGet a reference to every MetricsProvider service which is registered/unregistered in the OSGi container (note how easily we can extend our metrics system)

Our first metrics extension

At this point we have the core of our system, which, by its own, it does not measure anything :). Let´s build our first metric component, a JVM metrics provider (a stupid one :) ). How can we do that? Just two easy steps

Implement the SPI wich the core system is exposing

Register the previous implementation as an OSGi service (we are using the Declarative Service approach too):

And that´s everything we need to do. Simple, isn´t it?. Just package both components and deploy it to your LIFERAY_HOME/data/osgi/deploy folder and just see the logs. Now, you can connect to the console (as Ray has already shown) and stop your metrics-jvm component so JVM metrics will not be longer collected, or you can create a new metric extension, deploy it and start seing it metrics on the log.

I am, intentionally, hiding all the OSGi details since I want you to put the focus in the general idea, and not in the details of building a MANIFEST.MF. In the near future we will see more complex things like using Liferay services as OSGi services, creating OSGi based webapps, …

You can find all the source code in the following Github repo under the folder liferay-module-framework/examples/declarative-services.

I would love to hear your feedback and if you would prefer having a wiki page with all the new module framework related stuff instead of having long blog posts like this one (sorry about that)

Here is a simple form that I’m trying to get some feedback from the community what theme features are important to you.

Click the Image below to fill out the form
 

In which way we approach the continuous improvement of UX in Liferay?. It is always under the perspective of a continuous evaluation.

This so “formative” methodology is the direct consequence of our strong commitment to improve everyday in generating positive sensations and empowerment the idea that when we design and think about something, we must open our mind to new possibilities and translate the test’s feedbacks and the users’ comments, in an impacting treasure in themselves.

Everyday, lots of applications are incorporated, new patterns of use, new ways of interactions, and from all of them, we have to develop a plan of actions, that impact frequently in the user experience with Liferay.

Analyze, evaluate, design, test, develop new functionalities is the daily task more important realized from the UX department. For them, we can detail in commandments format, in an informal way, some behaviours that always rule our jobs:

• Investigate new patterns.
• Analyze comprehensively functionalities and behaviours.
• Learn from our mistakes and transform them in positive experiences.
• Less is more, if the user and his needs not being damned.
• Never take for granted anything: the user does not have the technical knowledge of our product’s developers.
• The user is the one determining the product’s success or fail.
• The unsuccess product’s cemetery is full of beautiful interfaces and marvellous buttons.
• We must identify and analyze our audience’s needs.
• UX is the union of everything. It is the glue that assembles and binds the different components: if the glue is bad, some elements will fall.
• Improve our product the user’s quality of life in his need and context.
• Question all the functionalities and associated behaviours.
• We can always improve our product.
• Be receptive and never reject any feedback. We always can offer new and best sensations to the user taking into account that is indispensable. We must decide in know how to see, know how to understand and, over all, know how to listen and study our users.  

In a more descriptive way, the continuous prospection and evaluation is generated realising constant evaluations as heuristics as experts, and the evaluations with users using techniques like focus group, etc. An indispensable part of the competence and our team’s experience is to know how to coordinate and program the type of test and evaluation techniques as the ideals for every part of the process and for what functionalities are needed for those checks.

All the sensations are analyzed constantly (test with or without users) and passed on in later applications or improvements, in order to influence positively in the user’s behaviours associated with the product. Those sensations could be influenced by the context of the use, cultural characteristics, etc…

Between all the possible action points we have to analyze, the main is the relationship between the difficulty of the use of the product, the underlying complexity between the objective of what the product must do and what the user gets and how gets it; that is the final purpose of any type of study.

Those relationships must be defined, establishing dimensions between all the involved factors:

Ethically: that product must satisfy the user’s needs, at least the initial needs that made him to decide for that product and not any other. But, even more, it must satisfy something that from Liferay we have as purpose and daily dogma: design, develop and offer a product that improve the user’s quality life. It is hard, but not impossible.

Relatively: Only the products adapting to the users’ real needs, with a target or prefixed audience, can generate a satisfactory User Experience. A product is not created due to an irreal need, it must always establish a relationship between all the tasks that develops, the tasks offering, and the studied needs that the audience requires. That dimension establishes that if there are loose ends not solved (needs) is impossible that the user gets his purposes, so the product is not useful.

Empirically: All the feelings, all the patterns of use and behaviours, can be analyzed and measured: Effectiveness, Efficiency, learning curve, satisfaction, association between mark and product, barriers and obstacles’ analysis that some groups can find when they use the product, or, for instance, how the user reminds the use of the product when he has not used for a while, etc.

Action / Reaction
Regardless of the type of study, of the format of evaluation or even the prospection and cataloging metrics obtained from them, we must never study or analyze the different areas in a separate way, without taking into account, like a common point, the dogmatic triangle that rules every type of strategy to improve the User Experience. Personally, I always use a definition of the concept of what is the UX by Andrew Dillon in 2001:’.

UX is the synthesizing of the most essentials behaviours associated to an user, to their interactions and senses obtained. Action, Result and Emotion.
“What the user realizes, what the product generates or returns about what the user asks, and the sense the user obtains of that action / reaction”.

Must the companies worry about UX?
YES, in all, UX is a way to an ending; it is not only to create positive experiences to get the happiness of someone. We want to drive, advice, give a sense to our product, and, even, generate senses that influence in the users to provoke they decide for our product.

Let’s see from a perspective of a website: when the user gets in it, he gets and provokes different interactions that generate a possible positive conversion between potential user and potential consumer of our product. I like it? I don’t like it? These sensations have a sudden impact in social networks: this product is very good, I recommend it… Thousands of potential consumers receive the tweet or publication depending on the experience and achievements obtained by that user, generating and influencing in the perception of the user reading straightly.

Great! Our sensation and our achievements in that product have been “spread “ automatically to a similar audience target or, in our best wishes, in other targets not studied nor analyzed. The user experience is more important than what we imagine at the beginning, more than the people can imagine. That user experience in similar environments, for instance, with similar products in functionalities, and even with similar interaction patterns, generate a type of habitual interaction, replacing the usual “first explain and after show”. Nowadays, when someone needs to explain, it means he has failed in all the aspects including in the UX.

Let’s see a real example, widespread in internet: “The 300 millions dollars’ button”.

This story is widespread in internet, and looking at the origin of some of the people who wrote it, it is so truly, that my only doubt is if there is other company apart the one we are thinking about.

It´s based in how a simple modification of a buy form in a website generated incomes for more than 300 millions dollars per year. Almost 45% more of potential buyers consummate their petitions and passed from consult and look to buy.

In this site, it was necessary to be registered before buying; however, if the customers came back, different scenes appear: they wanted to finish their buy, they forgot they were previously registered, or, for instance, they forgot the data they have used to register. How do they solve this lost of potential buyers? Easy and fast.

The UX designers decide to remove the register button in the buy process, and they put another (it is sure we remember it) with the legend “Continue” and the following text (You don’t need to create an account to realize your buy in our website. Click in “Continue” to pay your product….).

Results: 45% of conversion from potential buyers in collected sales, with an increase in annual billing of 300 millions dollars.

To my understanding, I think the effort in the analysis and ROI of that investigation of the process of conversion and buy by the UX responsible, was very profitable.

Could we assure 100% that our great product, website, etc has a marvellous UX? We could always improve something, and that could mean important profits that up to this moment we are not getting. Does it worth? ALWAYS.

In which way we approach the continuous improvement of UX in Liferay?. It is always under the perspective of a continuous evaluation.

This so “formative” methodology is the direct consequence of our strong commitment to improve everyday in generating positive sensations and empowerment the idea that when we design and think about something, we must open our mind to new possibilities and translate the test’s feedbacks and the users’ comments, in an impacting treasure in themselves.

Everyday, lots of applications are incorporated, new patterns of use, new ways of interactions, and from all of them, we have to develop a plan of actions, that impact frequently in the user experience with Liferay.

Analyze, evaluate, design, test, develop new functionalities is the daily task more important realized from the UX department. For them, we can detail in commandments format, in an informal way, some behaviours that always rule our jobs:

• Investigate new patterns.
• Analyze comprehensively functionalities and behaviours.
• Learn from our mistakes and transform them in positive experiences.
• Less is more, if the user and his needs not being damned.
• Never take for granted anything: the user does not have the technical knowledge of our product’s developers.
• The user is the one determining the product’s success or fail.
• The unsuccess product’s cemetery is full of beautiful interfaces and marvellous buttons.
• We must identify and analyze our audience’s needs.
• UX is the union of everything. It is the glue that assembles and binds the different components: if the glue is bad, some elements will fall.
• Improve our product the user’s quality of life in his need and context.
• Question all the functionalities and associated behaviours.
• We can always improve our product.
• Be receptive and never reject any feedback. We always can offer new and best sensations to the user taking into account that is indispensable. We must decide in know how to see, know how to understand and, over all, know how to listen and study our users.  

In a more descriptive way, the continuous prospection and evaluation is generated realising constant evaluations as heuristics as experts, and the evaluations with users using techniques like focus group, etc. An indispensable part of the competence and our team’s experience is to know how to coordinate and program the type of test and evaluation techniques as the ideals for every part of the process and for what functionalities are needed for those checks.

All the sensations are analyzed constantly (test with or without users) and passed on in later applications or improvements, in order to influence positively in the user’s behaviours associated with the product. Those sensations could be influenced by the context of the use, cultural characteristics, etc…

Between all the possible action points we have to analyze, the main is the relationship between the difficulty of the use of the product, the underlying complexity between the objective of what the product must do and what the user gets and how gets it; that is the final purpose of any type of study.

Those relationships must be defined, establishing dimensions between all the involved factors:

Ethically: that product must satisfy the user’s needs, at least the initial needs that made him to decide for that product and not any other. But, even more, it must satisfy something that from Liferay we have as purpose and daily dogma: design, develop and offer a product that improve the user’s quality life. It is hard, but not impossible.

Relatively: Only the products adapting to the users’ real needs, with a target or prefixed audience, can generate a satisfactory User Experience. A product is not created due to an irreal need, it must always establish a relationship between all the tasks that develops, the tasks offering, and the studied needs that the audience requires. That dimension establishes that if there are loose ends not solved (needs) is impossible that the user gets his purposes, so the product is not useful.

Empirically: All the feelings, all the patterns of use and behaviours, can be analyzed and measured: Effectiveness, Efficiency, learning curve, satisfaction, association between mark and product, barriers and obstacles’ analysis that some groups can find when they use the product, or, for instance, how the user reminds the use of the product when he has not used for a while, etc.

Action / Reaction
Regardless of the type of study, of the format of evaluation or even the prospection and cataloging metrics obtained from them, we must never study or analyze the different areas in a separate way, without taking into account, like a common point, the dogmatic triangle that rules every type of strategy to improve the User Experience. Personally, I always use a definition of the concept of what is the UX by Andrew Dillon in 2001:’.

UX is the synthesizing of the most essentials behaviours associated to an user, to their interactions and senses obtained. Action, Result and Emotion.
“What the user realizes, what the product generates or returns about what the user asks, and the sense the user obtains of that action / reaction”.

Must the companies worry about UX?
YES, in all, UX is a way to an ending; it is not only to create positive experiences to get the happiness of someone. We want to drive, advice, give a sense to our product, and, even, generate senses that influence in the users to provoke they decide for our product.

Let’s see from a perspective of a website: when the user gets in it, he gets and provokes different interactions that generate a possible positive conversion between potential user and potential consumer of our product. I like it? I don’t like it? These sensations have a sudden impact in social networks: this product is very good, I recommend it… Thousands of potential consumers receive the tweet or publication depending on the experience and achievements obtained by that user, generating and influencing in the perception of the user reading straightly.

Great! Our sensation and our achievements in that product have been “spread “ automatically to a similar audience target or, in our best wishes, in other targets not studied nor analyzed. The user experience is more important than what we imagine at the beginning, more than the people can imagine. That user experience in similar environments, for instance, with similar products in functionalities, and even with similar interaction patterns, generate a type of habitual interaction, replacing the usual “first explain and after show”. Nowadays, when someone needs to explain, it means he has failed in all the aspects including in the UX.

Let’s see a real example, widespread in internet: “The 300 millions dollars’ button”.

This story is widespread in internet, and looking at the origin of some of the people who wrote it, it is so truly, that my only doubt is if there is other company apart the one we are thinking about.

It´s based in how a simple modification of a buy form in a website generated incomes for more than 300 millions dollars per year. Almost 45% more of potential buyers consummate their petitions and passed from consult and look to buy.

In this site, it was necessary to be registered before buying; however, if the customers came back, different scenes appear: they wanted to finish their buy, they forgot they were previously registered, or, for instance, they forgot the data they have used to register. How do they solve this lost of potential buyers? Easy and fast.

The UX designers decide to remove the register button in the buy process, and they put another (it is sure we remember it) with the legend “Continue” and the following text (You don’t need to create an account to realize your buy in our website. Click in “Continue” to pay your product….).

Results: 45% of conversion from potential buyers in collected sales, with an increase in annual billing of 300 millions dollars.

To my understanding, I think the effort in the analysis and ROI of that investigation of the process of conversion and buy by the UX responsible, was very profitable.

Could we assure 100% that our great product, website, etc has a marvellous UX? We could always improve something, and that could mean important profits that up to this moment we are not getting. Does it worth? ALWAYS.

In which way we approach the continuous improvement of UX in Liferay?. It is always under the perspective of a continuous evaluation.

This so “formative” methodology is the direct consequence of our strong commitment to improve everyday in generating positive sensations and empowerment the idea that when we design and think about something, we must open our mind to new possibilities and translate the test’s feedbacks and the users’ comments, in an impacting treasure in themselves.

Everyday, lots of applications are incorporated, new patterns of use, new ways of interactions, and from all of them, we have to develop a plan of actions, that impact frequently in the user experience with Liferay.

Analyze, evaluate, design, test, develop new functionalities is the daily task more important realized from the UX department. For them, we can detail in commandments format, in an informal way, some behaviours that always rule our jobs:

• Investigate new patterns.
• Analyze comprehensively functionalities and behaviours.
• Learn from our mistakes and transform them in positive experiences.
• Less is more, if the user and his needs not being damned.
• Never take for granted anything: the user does not have the technical knowledge of our product’s developers.
• The user is the one determining the product’s success or fail.
• The unsuccess product’s cemetery is full of beautiful interfaces and marvellous buttons.
• We must identify and analyze our audience’s needs.
• UX is the union of everything. It is the glue that assembles and binds the different components: if the glue is bad, some elements will fall.
• Improve our product the user’s quality of life in his need and context.
• Question all the functionalities and associated behaviours.
• We can always improve our product.
• Be receptive and never reject any feedback. We always can offer new and best sensations to the user taking into account that is indispensable. We must decide in know how to see, know how to understand and, over all, know how to listen and study our users.  

In a more descriptive way, the continuous prospection and evaluation is generated realising constant evaluations as heuristics as experts, and the evaluations with users using techniques like focus group, etc. An indispensable part of the competence and our team’s experience is to know how to coordinate and program the type of test and evaluation techniques as the ideals for every part of the process and for what functionalities are needed for those checks.

Relationships & Dimensions

All the sensations are analyzed constantly (test with or without users) and passed on in later applications or improvements, in order to influence positively in the user’s behaviours associated with the product. Those sensations could be influenced by the context of the use, cultural characteristics, etc…

Between all the possible action points we have to analyze, the main is the relationship between the difficulty of the use of the product, the underlying complexity between the objective of what the product must do and what the user gets and how gets it; that is the final purpose of any type of study.

Those relationships must be defined, establishing dimensions between all the involved factors:

Ethically: that product must satisfy the user’s needs, at least the initial needs that made him to decide for that product and not any other. But, even more, it must satisfy something that from Liferay we have as purpose and daily dogma: design, develop and offer a product that improve the user’s quality life. It is hard, but not impossible.

Relatively: Only the products adapting to the users’ real needs, with a target or prefixed audience, can generate a satisfactory User Experience. A product is not created due to an irreal need, it must always establish a relationship between all the tasks that develops, the tasks offering, and the studied needs that the audience requires. That dimension establishes that if there are loose ends not solved (needs) is impossible that the user gets his purposes, so the product is not useful.

Empirically: All the feelings, all the patterns of use and behaviours, can be analyzed and measured: Effectiveness, Efficiency, learning curve, satisfaction, association between mark and product, barriers and obstacles’ analysis that some groups can find when they use the product, or, for instance, how the user reminds the use of the product when he has not used for a while, etc.

Action / Reaction
Regardless of the type of study, of the format of evaluation or even the prospection and cataloging metrics obtained from them, we must never study or analyze the different areas in a separate way, without taking into account, like a common point, the dogmatic triangle that rules every type of strategy to improve the User Experience. Personally, I always use a definition of the concept of what is the UX by Andrew Dillon in 2001:’.

UX is the synthesizing of the most essentials behaviours associated to an user, to their interactions and senses obtained. Action, Result and Emotion.
“What the user realizes, what the product generates or returns about what the user asks, and the sense the user obtains of that action / reaction”.

Must the companies worry about UX?
YES, in all, UX is a way to an ending; it is not only to create positive experiences to get the happiness of someone. We want to drive, advice, give a sense to our product, and, even, generate senses that influence in the users to provoke they decide for our product.

Let’s see from a perspective of a website: when the user gets in it, he gets and provokes different interactions that generate a possible positive conversion between potential user and potential consumer of our product. I like it? I don’t like it? These sensations have a sudden impact in social networks: this product is very good, I recommend it… Thousands of potential consumers receive the tweet or publication depending on the experience and achievements obtained by that user, generating and influencing in the perception of the user reading straightly.

Great! Our sensation and our achievements in that product have been “spread “ automatically to a similar audience target or, in our best wishes, in other targets not studied nor analyzed. The user experience is more important than what we imagine at the beginning, more than the people can imagine. That user experience in similar environments, for instance, with similar products in functionalities, and even with similar interaction patterns, generate a type of habitual interaction, replacing the usual “first explain and after show”. Nowadays, when someone needs to explain, it means he has failed in all the aspects including in the UX.

Let’s see a real example, widespread in internet: “The 300 millions dollars’ button”.

This story is widespread in internet, and looking at the origin of some of the people who wrote it, it is so truly, that my only doubt is if there is other company apart the one we are thinking about.

It´s based in how a simple modification of a buy form in a website generated incomes for more than 300 millions dollars per year. Almost 45% more of potential buyers consummate their petitions and passed from consult and look to buy.

In this site, it was necessary to be registered before buying; however, if the customers came back, different scenes appear: they wanted to finish their buy, they forgot they were previously registered, or, for instance, they forgot the data they have used to register. How do they solve this lost of potential buyers? Easy and fast.

The UX designers decide to remove the register button in the buy process, and they put another (it is sure we remember it) with the legend “Continue” and the following text (You don’t need to create an account to realize your buy in our website. Click in “Continue” to pay your product….).

Results: 45% of conversion from potential buyers in collected sales, with an increase in annual billing of 300 millions dollars.

To my understanding, I think the effort in the analysis and ROI of that investigation of the process of conversion and buy by the UX responsible, was very profitable.

Could we assure 100% that our great product, website, etc has a marvellous UX? We could always improve something, and that could mean important profits that up to this moment we are not getting. Does it worth? ALWAYS.

Liferay blogs can use embeded gists again! So in celebration here is a one that can be helpful for the resources importer. This is a list of all the portlet preferences for portlets located in liferay-plugins and internal ones in liferay-portal.

Serveral weeks ago we updated the Remote IDE Connector application to version 1.0.1.  This new update fixed the issues that we found with the 1.0.0 version of the Remote IDE Connector.  Namely, it works correctly now :)

So Liferay IDE users can now install (or update) this application into their remote portal instances and then setup a new Remote Liferay Portal Server adapter in Liferay IDE to connect to it and use it as a development and deployment target just like they would a local instance of Liferay Portal running on your machine.

To help out new users we’ve created a special wiki page for now to demostrate how to configurate it.  I hope to get this information moved over to official documentation for Liferay IDE in the near future.  For now if you have any problems with either the Remote IDE Connector or the Liferay Remote Server Adapter be sure to create a new thread in the Liferay IDE Forums.

We’ve added a new section to the Liferay Development Guide covering the Resources Importer: http://bit.ly/16JU01D. Liferay’s Resources Importer is a tool that allows a theme developer to have files and web content automatically imported into the portal when a theme is deployed. This is a great way for theme developers to provide a sample context that optimizes the design of their theme.

In this section, you can find out

• what the Resources Importer does and why it’s useful.
• how to download and install the Resources Importer.
• how to declare the resources importer as a dependency of your theme.
• how to configure resources to be imported into a site template or directly into a site.
• how to develop resources and add them to your theme.
• how to declare the pages, layout templates, portlets and content that should appear in your theme’s site or site template.
• where to find examples of themes that show the resources importer in action.

If you’re considering developing themes for Liferay Marketplace, make sure to check out this guide!