[OpenID] New OpenID Customer Research Activity - Google research on federated login

[Eric Sachs]

>> I do have a security concern with this approach in that most likely the
AOL user will enter their AOL password because of the past experience. This
causes a security leak for the user even if buy.com is not just throwing
away the value.

Yes, we did see that in user's who came back the "second time."  However the
RP can detect that case, and warn the user of the mistake they are making
which should also help train them in the future both on this RP, and others.
 The IDP can also try to warn the user on the first identity verification
step to avoid making that mistake, but that is not as a good a "trainable
moment."  Along these same lines, we saw that by adding icons for IDPs to a
login box, the pretty sizeable % of users immediately tried to enter their
IDP E-mail/password directly into the login box.  Allen Tom from Yahoo
shared some data last week that showed they saw the same thing.  I don't
think there is a 100% perfect solution here, but the worst case is that RPs
don't support federated login at all and end users just choose to use the
same login/password as their E-mail provider across lots of other sites (and
our stats indicate that most sadly do).


>> Would it not be possible to use AJAX to check the user's entered email
address against the buy.com data base to see if they've registered and if
so, hide all the options and just show the user the login button? Or maybe
replace the "Help me login" and "I have a password" options with text that
says, "you are already a member of buy.com via your AOL identity. All you
have to do is click the login button?"  I suppose that might scare some
users because they would think their account doesn't have any password at
all.

This was an idea we considered and is on our list to evaluate, but we don't
have any usability data on it yet.  Technically there were some concerns
about how well this would interact with browser auto-fill of login box
information.  It would be great if a live RP tried out a model like this and
reported back the results.


On Tue, Sep 23, 2008 at 8:02 AM, George Fletcher <gffletch at aol.com> wrote:

> Some thoughts after reading through the summary (
> http://sites.google.com/site/oauthgoog/UXFedLogin) page...
>
>> Fortunately, even though they are confused, nearly all users did enter
>> their E-mail address and clicked the login button.  As long as they do that,
>> it does not matter whether they chose Yes or No in the UI, nor does it
>> matter whether they typed a password.  Buy.com just needs to know that their
>> domain is aol.com, and can then redirect them to AOL to verify their
>> identity.
>>
> I do have a security concern with this approach in that most likely the AOL
> user will enter their AOL password because of the past experience. This
> causes a security leak for the user even if buy.com is not just throwing
> away the value.
>
> Would it not be possible to use AJAX to check the user's entered email
> address against the buy.com data base to see if they've registered and if
> so, hide all the options and just show the user the login button? Or maybe
> replace the "Help me login" and "I have a password" options with text that
> says, "you are already a member of buy.com via your AOL identity. All you
> have to do is click the login button?"  I suppose that might scare some
> users because they would think their account doesn't have any password at
> all.
>
> Great research. It really helps to identify the problematic cases and where
> we need to focus UI efforts.
>
> Thanks,
> George
>
>
> Eric Sachs wrote:
>
>> Last Week the OpenID Foundation held the first meeting of their Content
>> Provider Advisory Committee to gather feedback on how to evolve the best
>> practices for using OpenID so that it might be used by websites in a larger
>> number of market segments. The meeting included representatives from many
>> mainstream content websites including The New York Times, BBC, AARP, Time
>> Inc., and NPR.  I attended from Google, and thought the team who pulled
>> together the meeting did a great job arranging it.
>>
>> Google has been researching federated login techniques, and at the meeting
>> we showed how a traditional login box might evolve (see below) to a new
>> style of login box that better supports federated login.
>>
>> <http://sites.google.com/site/oauthgoog/UXFedLogin>
>>
>> We also shared a summary <
>> http://sites.google.com/site/oauthgoog/UXFedLogin> of our usability
>> research that explains how this helps a website add support for federated
>> login for some users without hurting usability for the rest of the website's
>> user base.  This research is not yet finalized, and we are still working
>> with a bunch of companies to gather more feedback to tune this research.  If
>> you have any feedback, feel free to get in touch with me.  However more
>> generally we hope people will continue to contribute to the user experience
>> discussions that are happening regarding many different use cases for
>> OpenID, and not just the one covered in this research document.
>>
>> p.s. For Google's original blog post on this research, please refer to
>> http://google-code-updates.blogspot.com/2008/09/usability-research-on-federated-login.html
>>
>> Eric Sachs
>> Product Manager, Google Security
>>
>> ------------------------------------------------------------------------
>>
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>
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