I'm still not a fan of putting a button saying 'uk access management
federation' for a number of reasons:
- it inaccurately positions the federation as carrying out access
management, which of course it does not. Do we really want students
identifying with the federation...and potentially inundating JANET with
support phonecalls??
- it is not scalable for larger publishers - should they include the logos
for 13+ federations all with confusingly similar names?
- it inaccurately positions the federation as a competitor to access
management solutions such as Athens, which it isn't - the solutions are
mutually compatible.
JSTOR have sort-of handled this problem for the UK by maintaining the Athens
link on the front page - http://www.jstor.org/, thereby maintaining the
status-quo user experience. This would cope with institutions piloting Shib
via the WAYF but still wishing to maintain Athens for most users. However,
by creating a multi-technology SP maintained WAYF they have just ensured
that there is a greater chance of catching all users.
Interestingly enough, librarians seem to be preferring the JSTOR approach
and techies the multi-button approach :-)
On Fri, 6 Jul 2007 15:12:31 +0100, Fiona Culloch
<[log in to unmask]> wrote:
>Sean Dunne wrote:
>
>> I think we should try to make things as clear for the users as possible,
>> and not rely on them having been told to follow a route that they don't
>> necessarily understand. Would any user understand why they had to change
>> from using an "Athens" button to a "UK Federation" button when the SP
>> removed their native Athens interface and their institution started using
>> the Athens-to-Shibboleth gateway, only to be taken back (eventually) to
>> the same Athens login page ?
>
>Well, at that point there would be only the one button left and thus
>no choice required.
>
>> > Are you in the happy position that each institution is guaranteed to
>> > want to use only one access mechanism at a time? E.g., consider
>> > an institution where most users are using Athens but they have a
>> > pilot-stage Shibboleth IdP as well, and they want to be able
>> > to use both. [...]
>>
>> In that case we could just add e.g. "<institution name> (Shib test)" as
>> an additional entry in our customsied WAYF.
>
>Which takes you back to the user having to choose between multiple
>technologies, either by understanding strange words like Shibboleth
>or by rote. (That was a recurring theme in our own discussions.
>There was eventually a consensus that users would potentially be more
>confused if we tried to hide what was going on, especially in error cases).
>
>Fiona.
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