New Shibboleth IdP Login page mockups

[Michael A Grady]

On Jan 2, 2013, at 1:07 PM, Steven Carmody wrote:

> 
> 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.

Indeed, Brown was the one production IdP that I tried (accessing the I2 Collab wiki and telling it Brown was my IdP) that did include the SP logo. But the current Brown login page did not appear to be "responsive" to significant screen size changes. However, since it included the SP name and logo after/"under" the Username/Password to start with, it is probably a good example of what you'd need to do with that SP info when "shrinking" to a mobile device screen. (Because I wouldn't think you'd want the screen to be dominated by the SP info and have to scroll down to see the Username/Password fields.)

And since I did a random sampling of only about 10 institutions login pages (Brown was the only with the SP logo), I certainly won't claim any statistical significance to my claim that most don't include it. But given that the UI elements (at least the logo) in metadata are relatively recent in the lifetime of institutions deploying Shib, it is understandable that institutions would not go back and redesign their login page to accommodate/use such unless they had other reasons for making significant changes to that page anyways.

> 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.

And I'd very much agree with that argument, but add that UI changes to a page you've been telling your users for quite some time "don't enter this username/password into any page other than this one, and verify this page is coming from the URL ...." won't be done lightly even if otherwise upgrading.  And, of course, if you have your IdP layered over CAS or some other underlying WebSSO service, then InCommon metadata with these UI elements aren't going to do you any good anyways, because CAS etc. don't consume and process SAML metadata today.
                    
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Michael A. Grady
Senior IAM Consultant, Unicon, Inc.