New Shibboleth IdP Login page mockups

[Steven Carmody]

On 12/24/12 3:15 PM, Michael A Grady wrote:
> Unicon has mocked up a proposed new default Login Page
> (username/password authentication) for the Shibboleth Identity
> Provider, and we'd like to begin a discussion with the Shib Dev (and,
> eventually, the Shib User) community on this design, and incorporate
> feedback, before we implement it. The screen mockups can be found at
> the following link (these were too big to send to the mailing list
> directly):
>
> - Note that with this mockup, there is only allowance for the Service
> Provider description (or name, or entityID if it falls back to that),
> and not the SP icon/image if such is in their UI metadata. I looked
> at a number of currently deployed institutional login pages, and I
> *cannot* find any instances of such where that SP image/icon is
> actually used/included.

Sorry for the delayed response -- Brown has been out on break since Dec 21.

A bit of background on the thinking about the SP/WAYF-DS/Login page/SP 
flow thru the user browser:

Several years ago JISC, in response to lots of reports about user 
confusion, commissioned a study of this flow, seeking recommendations on 
ways to improve the likelihood that users would successfully complete 
the flow. Cardiff won the RFP, and a report summarizing their work can 
be found here:

	http://sites.google.com/site/publisherinterfacestudy/

In addition, JISC commissioned a second study, done by a company named 
BunnyFoot. They measured users who were attempting to deal with this 
sequence of pages: they measured elapsed time between mouse clicks and 
they tracked the user's eyes moving around the various screens searching 
for "the next step". Unfortunately, while their report was very 
informative it was never released publicly. Perhaps Nicole can shed some 
light on this subject.

The Shib team then published a set of recommendations for this flow, and 
for the content and layout of the various pages. That "report" was 
available here:

https://spaces.internet2.edu/display/~lajoie@idp.protectnetwork.org/DSUI

unfortunately, that page has now gone missing.

In addition, NISO has published a set of Web SSO Guidelines for 
publishers; it also mentioned the login page. That report is available here:

	http://www.niso.org/publications/rp/RP-11-2011_ESPReSSO.pdf

If memory serves, that report closely models the recommendations from 
the Shib team.  ;-)

I believe the recommendation that the Login page should include the logo 
of the SP is mentioned in all of those reports; it was viewed as a way 
of providing consistent visual feedback to the browser user that "this 
page is being displayed as part of the process of you accessing (the SP 
represented by the logo)".

Hope this helps!

btw, I believe the Brown login page will display an SP logo, if one is 
available. However I wouldn't dispute your finding that there are 
actually few IDPs that do this. I might attempt to argue that this is 
consistent with the larger problem that IC has of moving sites to 
current releases, and getting them to leverage newer functionality. The 
R&S category is another example.