[OpenID] OpenID, usability and the art of being beaten up;)

[tom]

Hi All,

Today we released AROUNDMe Personal identity; a website builder with 
OpenID server and consumer allowing you to manage your own OpenID 
Internet identity. We have had a real battle on our hands with this and 
I thought I'd share our experience on list to hopefully assist others 
about to embark on a similar development route.

AROUNDMe used to be a free software website maker with integrated social 
networking. There are now quite a few services such as Ning and MySpace 
which follow this theme. I wanted to give people their own identity 
software and separate community / groups software, hence we took the 
decision to split the product into 3; a collaborative website builder, a 
personal identity website builder and a multi-user website builder. The 
idea was simple “one identity and easy access to many collaborative 
websites”.

This seemed such an obvious step that I almost expected a round of 
applause from our community [ok, small exaggeration]. Over the next 
several weeks/months we lost a large part of our community momentum in 
the project. Our website unique visitors fell dramatically as did any 
writing on our project in the blogsphere.

At a particular low point yesterday I found the following blog excerpt:


    "what ever happened to simplicity and keeping on track? These are to
    mainstays for success in developing software. Why the Aroundme
    project chose to throw out these things is beyond me. Once on their
    way to creating a popular PHP clone of the MySpace website they have
    changed directions and gone with some type of OpenSocial slash
    OpenID frankenstein."


We had not changed direction at all, but by adding OpenID and making a 
big deal about it we threw people. If I was going to do it again I would 
add it with no fanfare – those that know see it and those that don't don't.


We suffered terribly from usability issues; both with us and from 
external Ops. We also suffered from a lack of consumers [If every site 
supported OpenID we would have little problem explaining why it is useful].


We'll continue to hammer away at usability and distributing our product 
(to gain wider consumer usage). As part of that we'd be very happy if 
anyone on list would download AROUNDMe Personal identity, install it and 
give feedback. From my part, I will document the usability testing we 
did and the rather punishing responses we received. Here are just a few 
to make you pause for thought:


"I don't mind registering on a website, but I certainly don't want to 
give them my ID".

"If it is not a trust system why do you ask me to trust once or always? 
I do not trust this".

"How does this web site know all my details" (they had not realised they 
left the consumer and went to the OP).

... I could go on....

If our AROUNDMe Personal Identity screens / layouts are useful to you 
please feel free to copy any ideas from them.


OpenID is fantastic, implementing it is easy, explaining it hard. My 
tip: start with extending your service to those that know, help those 
that want to discover, camouflage it from those that don't and avoid 
being labelled as Frankenstein at all costs;)

I'm going for a drink now. Thoughts or similar experiences welcome.

Release available to http://www.barnraiser.org 
<http://www.barnraiser.org/> – any feedback is welcome and you can 
either leave a forum discussion on the site, email me or reply to list.


Tom





-- 
Tom Calthrop
Founding director, Barnraiser.

Dedicated to giving people the tools they need to share 
knowledge and advance society through social software.

Web site: http://www.barnraiser.org/
OpenID: http://tom.calthrop.info/