There was a meeting on the afternoon of Thursday, August 9th, 2007 to discuss the UI issues of authenticating to the MIT IdP. The attendees were Joanna, Josh, Bob, and Paul (for part of the meeting).
New UI html mockup
It's non-functional, but take a look at it here
Much of the feedback regarding the sample screen shots of one proposed UI has raised concerns about the complexity. Josh and Joanna suggested that we revisit the various potential flows and try to come up with a simple, base UI.
The ZEST:attached PDF captures the diagram that was created on the whiteboard during the meeting.
The main findings of the meeting were:
- Three buttons (one each for Certificates, Kerberos (http-spnego), and Username/Password)
- Have a seperate page to set preferences (and perhaps test choices).
- Eliminate the "confirmation page" that has existed in the prototype when authentication is successful.
Paul had to leave before the meeting concluded. It is his understanding that Joanna will work with Bob to create some simple HTML example page(s) for the top level page.
Since August 9th a number of key variations have been suggested.
1a) Have only two mechanism choices on the default login page. These would be Certificates and Username/Password. Kerberos (via http-spnego) would not appear as a choice on the default page. Instead Kerberos would appear as a choice on a seperate page where users could test their configuration and set a persistent preference. Note that in the managed environments such as Athena and WIN.MIT.EDU the Kerberos preference could be preconfigred for the user so that it would just happen and the user would never see the login page.
1b) Instead of having a Username/Password button that leads to screen with input fields for the data, have the default page include the input fields for the data, as the initial prototype page has been doing. Paul notes that this is not what the TechTime web login page does. Paul is also worried that such a design will encourage users to always enter their username and password. Such learned behavior is likely to lead more users to do this at other web sites as well.
2a) Include the ability to set preferences on the default page. Note that users would still need to search out and find a page to unset their preferences if they so desire.