[OpenID] Do users understand the concept of login domains?

Chris Messina chris.messina at gmail.com
Tue Dec 16 03:51:13 UTC 2008


This should probably be on user-experience at openid.net, but I'll leave it on
general@ for completeness.

On Mon, Dec 15, 2008 at 2:55 PM, Eran Hammer-Lahav <eran at hueniverse.com>wrote:

>
> And now comes by question and the subject of this post: do users understand
> the concept (and implementations) of login domains? If a site presented a
> Windows-like login dialog with place for username and input box (maybe with
> a drop-down option) for domain name, would people know what to do with it?
>

I think it depends.
For sign-in alone, perhaps not. To retrieve some kind of necessary or
applicable information, perhaps.

I've started pointing out that the "cloud" metaphor is gaining traction
because people are no longer JUST storing data on local harddisks. Instead,
they're storing it online in services like Flickr and Picasa... on hard
drives "in the sky".

Eventually, you can imagine that "login domains" will come to be associated
with information or data retrieval — and that when I want to sign in to a
remote service with my OpenID, I will pick the appropriate one because it
will be hooked up as a data broker to some portion of my online data. Until
we put some kind of rationale behind picking one OpenID provider over
another, interfaces like the Identity Selector will fail because people will
not know how to pick the appropriate account (what happens if I have an AOL,
Gmail AND Yahoo account for example, and I'm presented with the
idselector.com interface?).

The best way to justify this assessment is to look at Meebo. People
understand "login domains" in that context because they want to sign in to
one or more accounts to access certain people. If there were no resources on
the other ends of their IM accounts, what would motivate someone to use one
account over another?

Therefore, until we get PoCo and similar services published in a reliable
way in XRDS profiles, I think people will have no attachment to one OP over
another.

Chris


-- 
Chris Messina
Citizen-Participant &
 Open Technology Advocate-at-Large
factoryjoe.com # diso-project.org
citizenagency.com # vidoop.com
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