[OpenID] FB Connect, OpenID and UX

[Chris Messina]

I've heard of that study before as well.
There's a similar anecdote about what people would exchange for private
information about themselves (i.e. their weight -- though probably not a
candy bar). ;)

I have a friend who works as a secretary. When she's idle, she logs into her
friends' MySpace, Facebook and Orkut accounts (with their permission!) and
cleans out wallspam, replies to messages and comments and basically acts as
a "social networking secretary" or gardener (I could totally use her help!).
Her friends gladly trust her with their passwords in exchange for this
service.

I also once heard a story on NPR about teenage girls on MySpace who would
often share each other's passwords with each other and post to each other's
profiles. This was just a common thing that they did, to sort of live
vicariously since their profiles were private but they wanted to see how
certain friends interacted on their friends' MySpace pages.

My mom and her husband share one Gmail account since they get such a low
volume of email. For them it's more convenient to have ONE email account
that they share. What would it mean if one or both of them started to use
that address as their OpenID account?

There are lots of unexpected and non-standard uses of accounts that many
folks in this community might frown upon or discredit, but the reality is,
people do all kinds of weird things with their accounts. In some ways, we
need a McKinsey-style study of what people really do with their online
identities and personas that, if not help us to design better identity
technologies, at least helps us to better understand real world behavior.

The way that many of us geeks have internalized these technologies is not
the way that everyone has or will, and it's essential that we keep in mind
that "we" are not always the "user".

Chris


On Mon, Dec 15, 2008 at 3:51 PM, Eric Norman <ejnorman at doit.wisc.edu> wrote:

>
> On Dec 15, 2008, at 2:19 PM, Martin Atkins wrote:
>
> > I agree that it'd be useful to do some real user testing here and see
> > how many folks will happily give away their Facebook credentials to
> > anyone who asks. Does anyone in the community have the resources to do
> > such testing?
>
> Studies about credential sharing have been done.  I remember one
> done at Dartmouth where they found that 75% (I think?) of users
> shared their passwords and that some were willing to reveal their
> password for a candy bar.  I'm sorry I couldn't find a good
> reference for you.  There's some information at
> http://www.passwordresearch.com/stats/statistic239.html
>
> There also seem to be quite a bit of other research at this site.
>
> Eric Norman
>
> _______________________________________________
> user-experience mailing list
> user-experience at openid.net
> http://openid.net/mailman/listinfo/user-experience
>



-- 
Chris Messina
Citizen-Participant &
 Open Technology Advocate-at-Large
factoryjoe.com # diso-project.org
citizenagency.com # vidoop.com
This email is:   [ ] bloggable    [X] ask first   [ ] private
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://lists.openid.net/pipermail/openid-user-experience/attachments/20081215/b0a11edc/attachment-0002.htm>