Grouping stuff

By on December 27, 2010 in Interaction design
Facebook’s smart and getting smarter about how it reports stories in the news feed. A convention is to write “happy birthday” on a friend’s wall when it’s their birthday. So Facebook has started to add context to these multiple wall postings by saying X, Y and Z wrote on A’s wall for their birthday.

Similarly, friend additions are more smartly grouped. Back in the day (not so long ago), friends you added on Facebook would appear in a linear list, even if many friends were added in a short time period:

Bob is now friends with E.
Bob is now friends with D.
Bob is now friends with C.
Bob is now friends with B.
Bob is now friends with A.

An economical solution appeared when Facebook reported new friend additions in a list: Bob is now friends with A and 2 other people.

More recently, profile picture thumbnails were added, which would show the full name of the friend on mouseover.

How these groupings occur are a little mysterious, like the algorithm that displays friends in the left hand panel on new December 2010 profiles (side note: apparently these friends are randomly selected based on public interactions with these people. But many of the friends picked I’ve never actually publicly interacted with).

I’ve noticed that some friend additions get grouped into a list of thumbnails, some additions remain as strings. It’d be fun if you could select a friend addition and drag it to a nearby story to group it with another list. Or choose which story to highlight by dragging it to the top.

There’s tension between what users are able to customise and what is automatic. How far should users be able to customise their feed by dragging, grouping, and modifying stories?

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A smart browser that knows who you are

By on December 19, 2010 in Identity

The web lacks what Marc Canter calls “a big momma identity backplane”. Identity is left down to individual websites to decide how they’ll handle it. The result, of course, is a fragmented identity experience across the web, or what Kim Cameron calls a “patchwork of identity one-offs” (and I love this as it describes the situation succinctly and perfectly).

I started my MSc project focusing on one of the solutions to the problem of identity management, which is OpenID. This is an open federated identity protocol for sharing an identifier across different services, made up of identity providers (such as Google or Yahoo) and relying parties (a website that allows users to login using their Google or Yahoo account). I’ve moved away from sole focus on OpenID as I think “What should usable identity management on the web look like?” is a more interesting research question.

OpenID has a terrible user experience. Signing in with a URL is confusing for average users who have learned that authentication requires a username and a password.  Learning how to use OpenID has a higher cognitive overhead for novice users than simply signing up via HTTP authentication. The redirects — an undelightful part of the OpenID experience — are also a phishing risk.

Ben Laurie explains how OpenID is a phishing heaven with a kitten site story:

“…I just persuade you to go anywhere at all, say my lovely site of kitten photos, and get you to log in using your OpenID. Following the protocol, I find out where your provider is (i.e. the site you log in to to prove you really own that OpenID), but instead of sending you there (because, yes, OpenID works by having the site you’re logging in to send you to your provider) I send you to my fake provider, which then just proxies the real provider, stealing your login as it does. I don’t have to persuade you that I’m anything special, just someone who wants you to use OpenID, as the designers hope will become commonplace, and I don’t have to know your provider in advance.”

There are too many identity providers, not enough relying parties. And there’s also the NASCAR problem.

But anyway.

I think solutions to web identity management are trying to handle identity on the wrong level. I like the “big momma identity backplane” idea. How about an interim identity backplane: a smart browser that knows who you are. Aza Raskin creates a great argument here. It absolutely baffles me that this doesn’t already exist (apart from a fledgling Firefox plugin that supports Yahoo and Google).

A smart identity-enabled browser seems far more valuable to me than a browser that has social services built in. The identity-enabled browser should:

  • allow a painless login and signup: users select a bundle of attributes — their identity — to sign up with, and select an existing identity to sign in with
  • allow anonymity
  • not remove control from users that they already have
  • allow users to see clearly what data they are sending to services, and what data services own from them
  • hide the complexity of authenticating with web services from the user
  • keep the user safe from phishing

The success of an identity-enabled browser depends on how well it implements the above. One problem is the conflict between identity handled in the browser and interfaces that invite identity management on the web canvas.

In conclusion, I seem to have picked an enormous and deeply complicated topic, and I’m dipping my toe in the water.

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Whoops

By on November 22, 2010 in Personal, Work

I’ve been remiss with the blog. I’m going to publish my reflections on the internship in due course, but here’s an update for now.

In early November I returned to UCL to finish my MSc. All I have left to do is my project. I say ‘all’ like it’ll be easy, but it’s actually going to be a little different from what I’ve done so far. I’m doing a HCI research project which is going to focus on OpenID. I interrupted my studies to do an internship with Google, so my classmates have all completed their projects and have graduated—I’m doing the project solo. Of course, I’m not complaining!

As many of you readers are probably aware, OpenID has a lot of interesting user experience problems. I’ve been reading up on the discussions around it, as well as usability research, and I feel a little intimidated by the level of passion in the community around identity management. I’ve also kept my eyes peeled for other Single Sign-On ‘trends’ on the web.

I recently came back from a vacation in California. I stayed in San Francisco but visited Mountain View a number of times, including the Hacker Dojo where I got to see a number of projects people are working on. I saw three projects and all had implemented a nice “Login with Facebook” button. It makes it easy to get users on board, but it also feels a slightly dirty solution to me. I’m not entirely happy clicking that blue button, but the lazy part of me enjoys the convenience of instantly accessing a new web service without struggling through web forms and passwords.

So this is where my mind is right now, and will be until around February: login forms, identifiers, identity management, open and decentralized federated identity.

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Summer Noogler

By on June 27, 2010 in Personal

I finished my first week at Google UK as a User Experience Intern. I’m officially a Noogler! Google employees are called Googlers, therefore new Googlers are called Nooglers. On accessing my inbox for the first time I found a ‘Noogler Massage Credit’ which I shall be scheduling sometime between now and October. And so it starts.

Between now and October I want to learn as much as I can. Specific learning goals will centre around putting theory I learned at UCL into practice, developing my design and user experience skills across the board, and learning as much as I can from the smart and talented people around me.

I’m very excited to get a taste of what it’s like to work for a company that’s adding tremendous value to the web and people’s everyday lives. I am, of course, going back to UCL in the autumn to finish my MSc research project.

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