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

Tue Sep 23 21:56:42 UTC 2008

>> So, in essence, this solution is geared towards RP's that mandate needing
an e-mail address and don't trust an OP's assertion of ownership, thereby
forcing them to only accept e-mail-based OP's.

A better way to put it might be that it is geared towards RPs who measure
the # of user actions in the signup flow as the definition of success.
 Until we have some other good statistics to show them from live RPs, that
seems to be the primary measure that they use to grade the different
options.  That is why we added such a long section to our UI research which
describes the specific # of steps in different scenarios.  And along those
lines, that is one of the reasons many of them are interested in the idea of
the IDP showing the terms of service of the RP just to reduce the # of steps
further.

>> I agree that many sites do want e-mail, but this is a data field that can
be gathered after authenticating against a non-email-based OP.  Also, sites
that don't require e-mail address validation after initial sign-up probably
can trust an OP's claim about a user's e-mail address.

We thought so as well.  But what we then learned from talking to existing
websites that have experimented with federated login is that without the
immediate E-mail validation by the IDP, the RP has no way to determine
whether the user has a pre-existing legacy account.  So they need to both
ask the user if they do (and to enter the legacy E-mail/password), as well
as to send the background E-mail validation.  If they don't add this step, a
lot of users end up with multiple accounts and get really confused.  If they
do add these steps, then our "grade" goes down.

I am hoping to find an RP for a mainstream website that is willing to try
this new login box style, but to accept not only E-mail address inputs, but
also OpenID domains/vanity-URLs.  Then hopefully they could report the % of
accounts that use each of these 3 types, as well as the % success rate for
the signup flow of each step.  My personal guess is that anyone who is
technical enough to type in a vanity URL will be willing to perform the
extra steps for legacy account matching & E-mail address validation.
 However that is only a guess.

On Tue, Sep 23, 2008 at 2:41 PM, max engel <max at 8bitkid.com> wrote:

> So, in essence, this solution is geared towards RP's that mandate needing
> an e-mail address and don't trust an OP's assertion of ownership, thereby
> forcing them to only accept e-mail-based OP's.  I agree that many sites do
> want e-mail, but this is a data field that can be gathered after
> authenticating against a non-email-based OP.  Also, sites that don't require
> e-mail address validation after initial sign-up probably can trust an OP's
> claim about a user's e-mail address.
>
> I do have concerns about pushing RP's to adopt this sort of federated
> model, because it creates a hierarchy of OP's.  That worries me, as does the
> potential fragmented user experiences between user's who use a URL-based OP
> and those coming from an e-mail provider...
>
> _max
>
>
>
> On Sep 23, 2008, at 1:22 PM, Eric Sachs wrote:
>
> >> Now, with my "MySpace" hat on, I am biased towards URL-based identity,
> since our users will leverage their vanity URL as their OpenID
> Roughly half of Google Accounts are not gmail users, so we actually share
> that same bias :-)  The proposal in this research basically means that we
> would only be able to help half our users with federated login, and that is
> really unfortunate.
>
>
>
> >> I'd love to see RP's move towards similar design patterns like this to
> help users get acclimated to Federated Login, but do want to make sure that
> it would be extensible to non-email based OP's.
>
> There are certainly RPs who are not as worried about E-mail, and for those
> our best (but early) results have been to change this "next generation"
> login box to replace "Enter your E-mail address" with "Enter your E-mail
> address or OpenID domain."  We specifically left out the visual logo of
> OpenID and appended the term domain.  Those changes seem to reduce the % of
> regular users who were confused, but did catch the attention of highly tech
> savvy users who were aware of OpenID.  However it still requires them to
> know the domain of their OpenID IDP, and so that restricts further the % of
> savvy users who can make use of that advanced feature.  We tried a few
> options for leading the user to a drop down of IDPs, but they all had
> surprisingly high negative impact on regular users.  Another problem the
> live RP sites today who act as OpenID IDPs have found that after a user
> signs up with their site using OpenID, they then have to prompt them to find
> out if they have a legacy account on that site which should be migrated.
>  Advanced users might not mind that, but for average users every additional
> step in the account signup process causes a significant drop off.
>
> However even beyond the UI problem, the bigger problem is that most RPs are
> unwilling to give up on having an E-mail address for their customers, and
> they don't trust one OpenID IDP to assert that a user owns an E-mail address
> at a different provider.  If an RP of that type wants to support IDPs that
> are not E-mail providers, then their account signup process will require the
> user to both prove ownership of an OpenID URL, and then prove ownership of
> an E-mail address via a second flow.    If we wanted to reduce that
> usability problem, we could try to get E-mail providers to allow their users
> to publicly specify a different OpenID IDP which was their identity
> provider.  That might be enough for an RP like an online magazine to allow
> an IDP like MySpace or Google to assert the E-mail address of a school
> alumni E-mail address.  But this is a pretty advanced use case, so while we
> hope it will possible to do this some day (so that we can help the other
> half of our user base), we have been more focused in the near term on the
> simpler model around E-mail address.
>
> Interesting,
>
>
>
>
> On Tue, Sep 23, 2008 at 12:48 PM, max engel <max at 8bitkid.com> wrote:
>
>> My main concern is that the federated model doesn't support IDP's who use
>> URL's for users.  Now, with my "MySpace" hat on, I am biased towards
>> URL-based identity, since our users will leverage their vanity URL as their
>> OpenID, but I imagine that blogs, etc. are all in a similar situation where
>> we want to acclimate our users to thinking of themselves as URL's.
>> While EAUT is definitely a great service for IDP's that are e-mail based,
>> designing a federated login system around "Enter your eMail Address" does
>> worry me.
>>
>> I'd love to see RP's move towards similar design patterns like this to
>> help users get acclimated to Federated Login, but do want to make sure that
>> it would be extensible to non-email based OP's.
>>
>> _max
>>
>> On Sep 23, 2008, at 8:55 AM, Eric Sachs wrote:
>>
>> >> 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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