Chaotic User Experience
Contents
Full Title
It is mid 2021 and the forces working on Identity Management appear to be converging on religious wars.
The Happy Present
As the number of web sites grew, clearly users were not happy with the idea of an entire book filled with user names and passwords, all of which were different because no one that held your secrets could be trusted to keep them secrets. What made the situation even worse was the well-meaning security folk that resulted in every web site have a different set of rules about how user names and password were constructed, complexity rules they were called, and complexity was the result for users. Since none of that worked the users were primed for a better solution.
Two systems exist today and each has their own set of adherents and the users seem to have adapted:
- Password managers
- Megalithic social site IDs.
The Reformation
Whenever power is concentrated in one authority, they become corrupt. We know that all power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely, so there should be no surprise that the monopoly power of the dominate social network Identifier Providers has corrupted them. It cannot be otherwise. In a capitalist society this behavior is enforced by the market's demand for continued quarter by quarter growth in profits. Any manager that fails in the one measure is quickly replaced by one that is more inclined to milk any advantage for improved profit margins.
It is at this point that some reformer tacks their 95 theses to the cathedral door demanding change.
The Counter-reformation
Thus begins the 30 year war. With the faster pace of technology we can expect that to be compacted into a 30 week war, but is will appear by the participants to be long and hard fought. Only the victorious princes enjoy the result, the troops at the front line and the non-combatants (you and I) all hate war.
The Inquisition
The User
So where is the unhappy user in all this? The various religions all purport to be in the business of saving the user's private souls. But do either of combatants actually ask the user what they might prefer? Not yet it seems. None of the use cases from either side actually address the user experience. Every use case is must one more attempt at proving that the writer's religion is the best one.
The net effect of religious wars is just to proliferate the number of choices for the user and divide on side from the other. It is time for this to stop, but religious wars seem to be incapable of seeking unity.
Who can come up with a happy solution? The Greek theater came up with the "Deus Ex Machina", the god that descended from above with a hoist that was cranked by a stage hand. That result is much better than another protracted war where all the users are victimized by one side or the other.
