A little over a week ago I attended a meeting in London organised by the JISC Collections team entitled From discovery to log-in and use: a workshop for publishers, content owners and service providers.
The meeting was targetted at academic publishers (and other service providers), of whom there were between 30 and 40 in the room. It started with presentations about two reports, the first by William Wong et al (Middlesex University), User Behaviour in Resource Discovery: Final Report, the second by Rhys Smith (Cardiff University), JISC Service Provider Interface Study. Both reports are worth reading, though, as I noted somewhat cheekily on Twitter prior to the meeting, if the JISC had paid more for the first one it might have been shorter!
Anyway... the eagle-eyed amongst you will have noticed that the two reports are somewhat different in scope and scale. Both talk about 'discovery' but the first uses that word in a very broad 'resource discovery' sense whilst the second uses it in the context of the 'discovery problem' as it applies to federated access management - i.e. the problem of how a 'service provider' knows which institutional login page to send the user to when they want to access their site. This difference in focus left me thinking that the day overall was a little out of balance.
For this blog post I don't intend to say anything more about 'resource discovery' in its wider sense, other than to note that Lorcan Dempsey has been writing some interesting stuff about this topic recently, that there are issues about SEO and how publishers of paid-for academic content can best interact with services like Google that could usefully be discussed somewhere (though they weren't discussed at this particular meeting), and that, in my humble opinion, any approach to resource discovery that assumes that institutions can dictate or control which service(s) the end-user is going to use to discover stuff is pretty much doomed from the start. On that basis, I'm not a big believer in library (or any other kind of) portals, nor in any architectural approach that assumes that a particular portal is what the user wants to use!
The two initial presentations were followed by a talk about the 'business case' for an 'EduID' brand - essentially a logo and/or button signifying to the user that they are about to undertake an 'academic federated login' (as opposed to an OpenID login, a Facebook Connect login, a Google login, or whatever else). Such a brand was one of the recommendations coming out of the Cardiff study. I fundamentally disagree with this approach (though I struggled to put my case across on the day). I'm not convinced that we have a 'branding' problem here and I'm worried that the way this work was presented makes it look as though the decision that we need a new 'brand' has already been taken.
During the ensuing discussion about the 'discovery problem' I mentioned the work of the Kantara Initiative and, in particular, the ULX group which is developing a series of recommendations about how the federated access management user experience should be presented to users. I think this group is coming up with a very sensible set of pragmatic recommendations and I think we need to collectively sit up and take some notice and/or get involved. Unfortunately, when I mentioned the initiative at the meeting, it appeared that the bulk of the publishers in the room were not aware of it.
To try and marshal my thoughts a little bit around the Kantara work I decided to try and implement a working demo based on their recommendations. I took as my starting point a fictitious academic service called EduStuff with a requirement to offer three login routes:
- for UK university students and staff via the UK Federation,
- for NHS staff via Athens, and
- for other users via a local EduStuff login.
I'm assuming that this is a reasonably typical scenario for many academic publishers (with the exception of the UK-only targetting on the academic side of things, something I'll come back to later).
Note that this scenario is narrower than the scope of the Kantara ULX work, which includes things like Facebook Connect, Google, OpenID and so on, so I've had to interpret their recommendations somewhat, rather than implement them in their totality.
You can see the results on the demo site. Note that the site itself does nothing other than to provide a backdrop for demonstrating how the 'sign in' process might look - none of the other links work for example.
The process starts by clicking on the 'Sign in' link at the top right (as per the Kantara recommendations). This generates a pop-up 'sign in' box offering the three options. Institutional accounts are selected using a dynamic JQuery search interface which, once an institution has been selected, takes the user to their institutional login page. (My thanks to Mike Edwards at Eduserv for the original code for this). The NHS Athens option takes the user to an Athens login page. The EduStuff option goes to a fairly typical local login/register page, but one which also carries a warning about using one of the other two account types if that is more appropriate.
Whichever account type is chosen, the selection is remembered in a cookie so that future visits to the pop-up 'sign in' box can offer that as the default (again, as per Kantara).
Have a play and see what you think.
Ok, some thoughts from my perspective...
- In the more general Kantara scenario, some options (Facebook, Google, OpenID, etc.) are presented using clickable buttons/icons. I haven't done this for my scenario because the text wording felt more helpful to me. If icons were to be used, for example if a publisher wanted to offer a Google-based login, then I would probably present the NHS Athens and EduStuff choices as icons as well.
- You'll note that the word 'Athens' only appears next to the NHS option. I think that our Athens/OpenAthens branding should become largely invisible to users in the context of the UK Federation - or, to put it another way, one of our current usability problems is that publishers are still presenting Athens as an explicit 'sign in' option when they really do not need to so. In the context of the UK Federation, OpenAthens is just an implementation choice for SAML - users need be no more aware of it than they are of the fact that Apache is being used as the Web server. (The same can be said of Shibboleth of course). Part of our current problem is that we are highlighting the wrong brands - i.e. Shibboleth and OpenAthens/Athens rather than the institution - something that both the JISC and Eduserv have been guilty of encouraging in the past.
- The institutional search box part of the demo is currently built on UK Federation metadata, so it only offers access to UK institutions. There is no reason why this interface couldn't deal with metadata from multiple federations. Indeed, I see no reason why it wouldn't scale to every institution in the world (with some sensible naming). So although the current demo is UK-specific, I think the approach adopted here can be expanded quite significantly.
- On that basis, you'll note that there is no need in this interface for an EduID brand/button. Users need only concern themselves with the name of their institution - other brands become largely superficial, except where things like Google, Facebook, OpenID and so on are concerned.
- I've presented only the front page for the EduStuff site. On the basis that we can't control how users discover stuff, i.e. we have to assume that users might arrive directly at any page of our site as the result of a Google search, the 'sign in' process has to be available on each and every page of the site.
- Finally, the demo only deals with the usability of the first part of the process. It doesn't consider the usability of the institutional login screen, nor of what happens when the user arrives back at the publisher site after they have successfully (or otherwise) authenticated with their institution. I think there are probably significant usability issues at this point as well - for example, how to best indicate that the user is signed in - but I haven't addressed this as part of the current demo.
I'd be very interested in people's views on this work. It's at a very early stage - I haven't even presented it properly to other Eduserv staff yet - but we have some agreement (internally) that work in this area will likely be of value both to ourselves and our current customers and to the wider community. On that basis, I'm hopeful that we will do more work with this demo:
- to make it more fully functional, i.e. to complete the round-trip back to the EduStuff site after successful authentication,
- to make the 'sign in' pop-up into a re-usable 'widget' of some kind,
- and to experiment with the usability of much larger lists of institutions, taken from multiple federations.
Whatever our conclusions, any results will be shared publicly.
Overall the day was very interesting. I'll leave you with my personal highlight... the point at which one of the (non-publisher) participants said (somewhat naively), "What would it take to make all this [publisher] content available for free? Then we wouldn't need to worry about authentication". Oh boy... there was a collective sharp intake of breath and you could almost hear the tumble-weed blowing for a minute there! :-)
Addendum (8 July 2010): in light of comments below I have re-worked my demo using a more icon-based approach. This is much more in line with the current Kantara ULX mockups (version 4) including the addition of a 'more options'/'less options' toggle on second and subsequent sign ins. Overall, it is, I think, rather better than my initial text-based approach. I stand by my assertion that an EduId button is not required in the 'sign in' process demonstrated here (irrespective of whether the icon-based or text-based approach is used). That said, I'd welcome views on how/where such a button would fit in.
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