OpenID User Experience Tackled

Yesterday an OpenID user experience design summit was hosted by Facebook at its headquarters in Palo Alto. OpenID’s user experience has been criticized by users and media alike very often, especially in contrast to Facebook Connect. So it was time people came together, tackled the problem and were looking for solutions. Fortunately, Facebook streamed the event live, so everyone who could not attend, was able to watch it from home or office.

Presentations

Some interesting information was presented by participants. I think, the presentation by Brian Ellin of JanRain was especially informative as he showed how OpenID user interfaces changed over time. He also showed that users unfamiliar with OpenID don’t know what to type into the login form. They type in everything from email addresses to brand names to nonsense, even thinking it was a search box. Rather disillusioning, really! If it wasn’t obvious for people before, this presentation made clear, that users have to be educated, both by OpenID Providers and Relying Parties.

Probably the most media attention got Joseph Smarr‘s presentation of Plaxo’s and Google’s OpenID/OAuth flow. According to Joseph a staggering 92% of invited Gmail users returned to Plaxo. Incredible! However I doubt, those conversion rates will stay in the long run.

Google Popup Demo

Just in time for the summit, Google has released a demo of a user interface where OpenID login happens in a single popup. Users never leave the popup while authentication happens and even contacts are imported. Google also makes use of Attribute Exchange. Looks pretty slick!

Additional Information

Most (all?) presentations of the summit are up on Slideshare. Also Plaxo’s John McCrea was live blogging the event and also provides a summary of the OpenID Providers and Relying Parties “working groups” of the summit. Many people were also twittering the event. Facebook also promised to post a video of the summit, so watch the event site. I will also update this post when it’s up.

So you should get a pretty good idea of what was happening at Facebook yesterday. Looks promising!

Update Feb 12: The working groups came up with some best practices for both OpenID Providers and Relying Parties. They are up on the OpenID.net wiki.

Update Feb 13: Chris Messina uploaded his videos of the event to Vimeo. Those are not the hi-res videos, though.