Different ways to personalize experiences in Liferay Portal CE

Personalization has become a key part of customer experience. Essentially, by tailoring content for individual users depending on their characteristics, preferences and behaviour, companies can communicate, engage and delight customers across multiple channels, ultimately increasing both revenue and customer base.

Since Liferay Portal CE/DXP 7.2, there are a plethora of new features aimed at providing better and more personalized user experiences. In this blog, we’ll show you a set of these features to help you create the best experience for your customers.

Defining your audience and creating personalized experiences

For the initial setup, you need first to define your audiences and then create different experiences for them. For more information about how to do this, you can read this article: https://liferay.dev/blogs/-/blogs/creating-personalized-experiences-with-liferay-7-2.

We want to personalize an experience for our Liferay travellers. So we create a segment named “Travellers”. For example:

Then, in our Default experience, for example, we add a header fragment with some text and an Asset Publisher configured as “Title List”:

But remember that we want a specific experience for our travellers. So we are going to create a new experience with the recently created segment “Travellers”:

Now we have two experiences:

Default: for anyone.
Travellers experience: for users belonging to the “Travellers” segment.

Both experiences have exactly the same content: a header with a text and an Asset Publisher listing any Asset. But the idea was to personalize the content (the Asset Publisher in this case) for each audience/experience. So let’s do it!

Configuring widgets

Most of the out-of-the-box widgets can be configured. In this case, with the Asset Publisher, you can choose which content should be listed, how to display/order/filter it, etc.

For the Default experience, we configure the Asset Publisher with the Web Content structure “Book” and for Travellers with the Web Content structure “Country”. With this configuration, the users that belong to the “Travellers” segment are going to see the “Travellers experience” with a list of the most visited countries:

Also, as I mentioned before, we can change the display settings of the list: items per page, pagination type, etc.

Add custom widgets

Another way to personalize experiences is by creating new widgets with our custom design. In this case, we add the list of contents (asset list) using a Page fragment instead of an Asset Publisher (just to mention, <lfr-widget-asset-list /> is the taglib for the Asset Publisher widget):

Once you have created your custom widget, you can use it in your page through the Page Editor, just dragging and dropping it. As with the out-of-the-box widgets, custom widgets can also be configured/personalized:

Mapping Web Content in fragment fields

And last but not least, since Liferay CE/DXP 7.3 you can configure some page editor fields to map Web Content, Blog or Document fields. In this case, for example, for Travellers, we will display the data about Spain (Web Content structure “Country”): country image, name and description. In the Default experience, we will display the information about Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland book (Web Content structure “Book”): title, cover and synopsis. The fields can be positioned on the page as we want: