Using liferay as an interdisciplinary scientific collaboration portal

In order to support the interdisciplinary collaboration process within the Cluster of Excellence "Integrative Production Technology for High-Wage Countries", we set up a scientific cooperation portal that supports the researchers in various ways. The framework used to create such a portal is the open-source software Liferay. In 2015 we updated our previously used Liferay version 6.1 to the latest version 6.2, which came with several bug fixes and included new features. These new features promise an improvement in usability, but changing the user interface usually also comes with switching-costs. To ensure the system usability was actually improved, we conducted a comparative usability study of the two used versions, which is described in this publication.