Login dialog strawman based on IIW discussion

Mark Szpakowski mszpak at gmail.com
Wed Dec 20 03:52:44 UTC 2006


I want to mention one unexpected behavior we ran across when providing
an iName login, with a Login button and single text field for the
iName: many users treated it as a search field! Dozens per day! People
don't necessarily "read the fine print": a single text field at top
right perhaps triggers motor or contextual memory that that's where
they enter search terms - even though we also had a search box (at
upper left).

At any rate, a solution we just put in is to have a Login button: when
that is clicked, it slides open the text field for your OpenID (simple
Javascript). If the Login button is clicked and the text field is
empty, it closes the text field. Otherwise it goes ahead with the
OpenID authentication.

Initial observations is that this has pretty much elminated the false searches.

This is something to consider when providing a single-text-field
OpenID login as a default.

This could be extended to be a login widget which provides either a
one-field OpenID or a conventional two-field login.

- Mark



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