I’m not insisting on anything.  What I am questioning is whether we can find a 
way, any way, to make the UX on OIDF more intuitive.  If Google, Yahoo, AOL, 
Verisign, Vidoop, or the OIDF membership community can come up with a more 
intuitive way to log into our website, I think that’s a win and we should 
consider those options.  For those who haven’t talked to hundreds of mainstream 
RPs (not blogging sites with tech savvy users), typing in a URL is not 
intuitive for the masses.  Maybe someday it will be, but today it isn’t – 
period.  So it’s all well and good to be “neutral” but if we want to drive 
adoption and usage, we need to respond to what the market wants, or at least 
offer them options that are more compelling than what they’ve told us so far is 
clearly not.

When we talked with the former ED of the Bluetooth SIG, he gave an example 
about demonstrating Bluetooth for press and analysts.   The initial demos he 
gave were using a Toshiba laptop and mouse because Toshiba was one of the 
founding members of the SIG.  But the user experience at that time was pretty 
bad with Toshiba, so it didn’t serve the purpose of getting press and analysts 
excited about the reliability and ease of use of Bluetooth.  He then switched 
to doing demos with an Apple laptop and mouse (even though Apple wasn’t yet a 
member of the SIG), and the demos were a smashing success and resulted in much 
more favorable press and analysts coverage.

All I’m saying is that we can’t be dogmatic, we need to think about what our 
mission is, then make sure we’ve evaluated the best ways to achieve our 
mission.  If we can drive adoption and usage equally well with a “neutral” 
approach to everything we do on our website, with press & analysts, etc. that’s 
great.  But I think we’ll find over time that we need to be pragmatic and make 
tradeoffs.  We recently moved our wiki to PB Wiki which is provided by a 
vendor, presumably because it gave us the functionality we needed at a 
reasonable cost.  We didn’t write our own wiki software.  Many of the 
committees are using Google docs for collaboration, and that’s OK.

We have a lot of creative members of the OIDF, why don’t we ask them how to 
improve the UX of the OIDF website login in a way that will be intuitive for 
the masses that we ultimately hope to serve?  If we’re going to spend $2K, I’d 
advocate spending it on implementing that UX.

Cheers,

Brian
==============
Brian Kissel
Cell: 503.866.4424
Fax: 503.296.5502

From: [email protected] [mailto:[email protected]] On Behalf Of 
Eddy Nigg (StartCom Ltd.)
Sent: Thursday, December 18, 2008 9:15 AM
To: [email protected]
Subject: Re: [OpenID board] BOARD VOTE: Motion to update Rails plugin 
andOpenID.net ...

On 12/18/2008 06:59 PM, Brian Kissel:

Agreed there is no consensus on the UX for OpenID ;-)  Not sure there ever will 
be.  And to be clear, I was not requesting nor advocating paying anything to 
JanRain, only offering that we could do that for free if requested.  Seems like 
the simplest, quickest, cheapest thing would be to have Refresh Media put the 
text box on the front of RPX.  If AOL were willing to modify their UX at 
MapQuest to include the top X (10, 15, 20?) commercial OPs, would that be a 
better UX?

Nooooo! Why are you insisting on it? We want an OpenID vendor neutral 
interface. I really don't understand, is this a promotional circus for 
commercial providers or is this the OpenID Foundation? My provider would be 
most likely within the top ten or twenty, this isn't the point, it's about what 
a foundation is and represents.

Regards



Signer:

Eddy Nigg, StartCom Ltd.<http://www.startcom.org>

Jabber:

[email protected]<xmpp:[email protected]>

Blog:

Join the Revolution!<http://blog.startcom.org>

Phone:

+1.213.341.0390






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