OpenID - what are people's experiences of "login with x"?

Question

Stack Overflow is obviously a great example of really successfull implementation of OpenID, but let's be honest - it's a little easier when your target user base is geeks like us! I'm really interested to hear people's experiences of implementing OpenID outside hi-tech websites.

What kind of responses have you got from

• a) users?
• b) statistics?

with regards to the user experience of OpenID 'login with..' login systems?

Answer 1

With a universe of undergraduate university students, I had a positive experience. OpenID was required for them to register in an event. Beware the sample was small (around 150 persons) and of a narrow scope (undergraduates). Also note that OpenID was required, so they maybe they were willing to spend some extra effort.

Login with is essential and you need to add a small set of instructions, telling them to click a provider or to enter an OpenID address, and that they may have to register e.g. with myOpenId. Except for an audience of programmers, virtually no one is going to enter an address of his own the first time (some tried to enter their e-mail or their name, but then they eventually got it -- maybe they read the text). After registering with myOpenID, one or two entered their claimed identifier directly.

I showed only three possibilities: Gmail, Yahoo and myOpenID. For myOpenID, I used IDENTIFIER_SELECT (I didn't tell them to enter their username and use that to build the URL, like SO does). Around 80% used their gmail account, Yahoo accounts comprised little above 5% and the rest registered with myOpenID.

I only got two support e-mails where the users had made logins with two different identifiers and therefore weren't being associated with their previous login. The first case was a bug in the normalization phase of my OpenID implementation (a problem with trailing spaces). The second one was caused by the mandatory (per the spec) distinction between http://www.example.com/path and https://www.example.com/path. I think one should consider to disregard that part of the spec.