[OpenID board] BOARD VOTE: Motion to update Rails plugin andOpenID.net ...

[Brian Kissel]

I’m not insisting on anything.  What I am questioning is whether we can find a way, any way, to make the UX on OIDF more intuitive.  If Google, Yahoo, AOL, Verisign, Vidoop, or the OIDF membership community can come up with a more intuitive way to log into our website, I think that’s a win and we should consider those options.  For those who haven’t talked to hundreds of mainstream RPs (not blogging sites with tech savvy users), typing in a URL is not intuitive for the masses.  Maybe someday it will be, but today it isn’t – period.  So it’s all well and good to be “neutral” but if we want to drive adoption and usage, we need to respond to what the market wants, or at least offer them options that are more compelling than what they’ve told us so far is clearly not.

When we talked with the former ED of the Bluetooth SIG, he gave an example about demonstrating Bluetooth for press and analysts.   The initial demos he gave were using a Toshiba laptop and mouse because Toshiba was one of the founding members of the SIG.  But the user experience at that time was pretty bad with Toshiba, so it didn’t serve the purpose of getting press and analysts excited about the reliability and ease of use of Bluetooth.  He then switched to doing demos with an Apple laptop and mouse (even though Apple wasn’t yet a member of the SIG), and the demos were a smashing success and resulted in much more favorable press and analysts coverage.

All I’m saying is that we can’t be dogmatic, we need to think about what our mission is, then make sure we’ve evaluated the best ways to achieve our mission.  If we can drive adoption and usage equally well with a “neutral” approach to everything we do on our website, with press & analysts, etc. that’s great.  But I think we’ll find over time that we need to be pragmatic and make tradeoffs.  We recently moved our wiki to PB Wiki which is provided by a vendor, presumably because it gave us the functionality we needed at a reasonable cost.  We didn’t write our own wiki software.  Many of the committees are using Google docs for collaboration, and that’s OK.

We have a lot of creative members of the OIDF, why don’t we ask them how to improve the UX of the OIDF website login in a way that will be intuitive for the masses that we ultimately hope to serve?  If we’re going to spend $2K, I’d advocate spending it on implementing that UX.

Cheers,

Brian
==============
Brian Kissel
Cell: 503.866.4424
Fax: 503.296.5502

From: board-bounces at openid.net [mailto:board-bounces at openid.net] On Behalf Of Eddy Nigg (StartCom Ltd.)
Sent: Thursday, December 18, 2008 9:15 AM
To: board at openid.net
Subject: Re: [OpenID board] BOARD VOTE: Motion to update Rails plugin andOpenID.net ...

On 12/18/2008 06:59 PM, Brian Kissel:

Agreed there is no consensus on the UX for OpenID ;-)  Not sure there ever will be.  And to be clear, I was not requesting nor advocating paying anything to JanRain, only offering that we could do that for free if requested.  Seems like the simplest, quickest, cheapest thing would be to have Refresh Media put the text box on the front of RPX.  If AOL were willing to modify their UX at MapQuest to include the top X (10, 15, 20?) commercial OPs, would that be a better UX?

Nooooo! Why are you insisting on it? We want an OpenID vendor neutral interface. I really don't understand, is this a promotional circus for commercial providers or is this the OpenID Foundation? My provider would be most likely within the top ten or twenty, this isn't the point, it's about what a foundation is and represents.

Regards



Signer:

Eddy Nigg, StartCom Ltd.<http://www.startcom.org>

Jabber:

startcom at startcom.org<xmpp:startcom at startcom.org>

Blog:

Join the Revolution!<http://blog.startcom.org>

Phone:

+1.213.341.0390






__________ Information from ESET NOD32 Antivirus, version of virus signature database 3703 (20081218) __________

The message was checked by ESET NOD32 Antivirus.

http://www.eset.com
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://lists.openid.net/pipermail/openid-board/attachments/20081218/200c8534/attachment-0002.htm>