Last week I started work on a simple prototype to provide user profile information as part of BrowserID. What is this? Imagine only entering your profile information once instead of on every site you sign up to. Other companies have this goal as well, but their offerings suffer from either a lack of adoption or the user has little control over what data is given to the site.
The goals for providing profile information in BrowserID are:
- Allow the user to enter their profile information once.
- Provide profile information to sites through a DOM API that can be implemented by browsers.
- Keep the user in control over what data is released.
Our approach is to start simple and grow after we gain feedback. The feature as I have implemented it only has two fields, a name and a user’s photo. By starting with only two fields, we can start to get feedback on UX and what user’s perceptions are in relation to this data.
For sites to get the information, they will have to explicitly request which fields they are interested in. The user will then be shown the BrowserID dialog and will have the ability to deselect fields they do not wish to share. This is useful in situations where a site may request a user’s name, email address and photo, but the user is only comfortable supplying their name and email address.
A video on how this early prototype works:
BrowserID Profile Screencast from Shane Tomlinson on Vimeo.
Again, this is early days yet, but please help us make profile information in BrowserID rock! Message our mailing list at dev-identity@lists.mozilla.org or sign up to receive daily updates. Come see what we are up to in the Identity group or visit us on IRC in the #identity channel on irc.mozilla.org.
Awesome! This is the last missing feature to make BrowserID more awesome than OpenID, now that “immediate” “silent” mode is supported. Keep up the great work!
Looks good. Is there anything describing the usecases you’re aiming at to base comments around?
Thanks David, there are a lot of use cases that come to mind, but two in particular I really like are when signing up for a new site – nearly instant account creation. The second is for leaving comments on blogs such as this one – with basic profile information, you could leave a your comment without having to type your name and email address yet again.
Names are a tricky feature, they’re different for shipping, addressing the user, sorting. At least.
Are you in touch with the contacts API folks? They’re working on similar problems.
Thanks Axel – I have been pointed a few times to the W3C’s essay on Personal Names Around the World as a good reference regarding some of the problems. I haven’t been yet talked to the Contacts folks because as you say, they are sure to have a lot of good insight.
I tried to post this to the list a while back, but it appears to have failed to appear…
Hi all,
I took a look at the profile information prototype Shane posted [1], and have a few (hopefully useful) thoughts.
First off, I like the goals. I think the key is to note that it’s trying to simplify things for the user, and when it doesn’t do that, site authors have a clear alternative already. So there’s probably an upper limit on the number of pieces of information I’d expect to be included… finger in the air… 10? Billing address is one, but which seems unlike others in that it’s not something I’d necessarily want to give on sign-up/in, but is something I’d prefer to not re-type repeatedly. That implies (to me) UX which makes sense when you’ve already logged in, which I think would mean something a bit different.
On the video, my only comment is that I found the save button to be unclear, and the checkboxes default-on to be surprising. I think I’d tend to do away with the save button, and save by default, but flip the checkbox defaults to unchecked for subsequent requests.
HTH,
David