[OpenID] Combining Google & Yahoo user experience research

[Nate Klingenstein]

Eric,

That sort of a centralized discovery mediator is the model we've been  
working with for some time, originally termed a WAYF and now a DS.   
Ours have been federation-centric, generally all the schools in a  
particular country, but there's now active discussion of scaling that  
up to have a centralized service.

We've been trying to get rid of the centralized WAYF/DS for a long  
time for two main reasons.  The first is that the lists are getting  
preposterously long, with many hundreds of providers.  The second is  
that the service is likely to have a better idea which IdP's it's  
willing to accept, and can constrain the selections available in  
advance.

You abstract away the first problem by assuming a different entry  
point -- from the IdP rather than the RP -- but we've had  
difficulties with that in practice, because users like to go to  
services first. The second can always be caught when the user fails  
authorization, which is possibly even preferable from a UX  
perspective.  Even if we must face the first problem head-on, I don't  
think it's serious enough to make the CDS solution less appealing  
than the alternatives.

This is one of the many reasons federations have proven much more  
important and resilient than we'd ever imagined as the global  
Shibboleth deployment has grown.  It's not the sort of decentralized  
model that many would like to see, but I concur that it's the most  
likely and reasonable solution at present.

Thanks for the input,
Nate.

On 11 Feb 2009, at 19:14, Eric Sachs wrote:

> The Google team believes that for IDP discovery, there are options  
> that can be achieved without browser extensions.  In general Google  
> always prefers solutions that can be supported by the existing  
> installed base of browsers (especially mobile devices), as opposed  
> to requiring client side software installations.
>
> Here is a link to one such proposal that is not specific to IDP  
> discovery, but is designed to make a user's web browsing  
> preferences more portable.
>
> http://sites.google.com/site/oauthgoog/Home/pds

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