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

[Brian Kissel]

I don't know how much more clear I can be.  I'm NOT advocating for RPX, I'm advocating for a better UX on the OIDF website.  Rip out RPX today, that's fine.  Ask the community how we can improve OpenID login on the OIDF website, then get volunteers to implement it or pay Refresh or anyone else to implement it.  But let's make the OIDF website a showcase of the goodness of OpenID for users and RPs.  Like it or not, the OIDF website is a showcase for the broader market, not just a tool for OIDF members.  If we can improve UX and maintain neutrality, great.  But let's not sacrifice UX for neutrality if we know that the existing neutral UX is NOT intuitive.  Would love to see some ideas on what we could be doing to improve intuitiveness rather than just saying a text box is neutral, so let's just take the easy path and go that way.

Would like to hear from some others on how we can improve intuitiveness and whether it's important, not only on our website, but as a fundamental goal for the OIDF.

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 Dick Hardt
Sent: Thursday, December 18, 2008 10:15 AM
To: board at openid.net
Cc: larry drebes
Subject: Re: [OpenID board] BOARD VOTE: Motion to update Rails plugin andOpenID.net ...

On 18-Dec-08, at 9:58 AM, Brian Kissel wrote:


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.

We can drive to deliver what the market wants without compromising the Foundation.



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.

And our future ED can do demos of OpenID on whatever sites supporting OpenID make sense to communicate a message he/she is delivering. The OIDF website is not the site to use for this purpose.



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.

Yes we can about the OIDF website. The mission there is to be vendor neutral and interact with our membership. We should use vendor neutral OpenID technology and not endorse a particular approach.



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.

PB Wiki and Google docs are not targetted at the OpenID community. RPX is.
I am amazed that you are still arguing this point. Another vendor is not happy RPX is being used on the OIDF website. We are not dealing with the hypothetical. There is an issue.



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.

There is not $2K that we are wondering how to spend.



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