Login, sign in, ... what?

[Luke Shepard]

Yeah, we had this debate last year, and just scrapped it and went with Connect. The idea is that "login" or "signup" are too well established and fairly limiting- we wanted to give the sense that you were establishing an ongoing deep relationship between facebook and the site, not just a one-time login thing.

________________________________
From: openid-user-experience-bounces at lists.openid.net <openid-user-experience-bounces at lists.openid.net>
To: OpenID user experience <openid-user-experience at lists.openid.net>
Cc: OpenID user experience <user-experience at openid.net>
Sent: Thu Nov 12 10:26:49 2009
Subject: Re: Login, sign in, ... what?

And don't forget Twitter and Facebook's "Connect".

It would be nice if we established a convention and promoted it, but I'm not sure that'll happen.

Like profile photo sizes, each site does things a little differently and yet the effect of choosing any of the listed options doesn't really effect the overall usability of an app.

As well, "sign in" and "log in" no longer mean anything semantically — they're just short hand for "give me access to my account" (since "signing in" was something you did when you showed up for a field trip at school, and "logging in" was something you did on a black screen, green text terminal).

"Connect" is the more interesting language, since it implies an ongoing fusing of two resources — where data flows over a "connection"... not unlike what happens when you "plug in" a plug to a wall outlet. Until you sever the connection, the juice will flow.

I have also seen new language emerging in comment forms that is starting to approximate what it means to present an OpenID and confirm ownership of it:

http://flic.kr/p/7eMb8H

Here the language used it "identify yourself via"...

JS-Kit's Echo comment service uses the email metaphor to good, if not somewhat strange, effect:

http://flic.kr/p/7fcHwU
http://js-kit.com/

Anyway, all this is to say that we haven't quite cracked the nut yet as to what's really going on with something like OpenID to say that "sign in" or "log in" is sufficient. "Connect" is closer, but obscures which data is being made available as part of that connection.

I'm glad you brought this up though, since it is something that bears inspection.

Chris

On Wed, Nov 11, 2009 at 8:27 PM, Johannes Ernst <jernst+openid.net<http://openid.net>@netmesh.us<http://netmesh.us>> wrote:
Informal Survey:

Yahoo:
       Sign In

Google:
       Sign in / Sign out

Digg:
       Login / Logout

Slashdot:
       Log In / Log Out

AOL:
       Sign In

MySpace:
       Log In

Facebook:
       Login

MSN:
       Sign in

NYTimes:
       Log In


... and this isn't even limited to OpenID Log/sign/in. Even capitalization and spacing is different.

As part of the OpenID user experience, can we narrow this down? Or is that counter-productive?


Cheers,



Johannes.

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