Yahoo released their OpenID usability research. In short, OpenID failed miserably.

Part of the confusion, I believe, is that users must learn that “yahoo.com” is their OpenID URL. That doesn’t make sense.

If everyone had their own website — a “home page” for their identity on the web — OpenID adoption would be much simpler. I can promote my identity with one URL that will (ideally) never change: http://marcuscavanaugh.com/. I associate that URL with my identity.

But people without their own website must outsource their identity to their most trusted provider. In this case, Yahoo’s test subjects needed to equate their Yahoo! ID with their online presence everywhere on the internet. That’s a foreign concept, and a crucial difference.

It is completely counterintuitive to think that “yahoo.com” should be used as an OpenID URL; “yahoo.com” is not a unique identifier for any individual.

A better alternative: Yahoo! should assign users a homepage URL like “http://yahoo.com/myusername“, and then instruct users that their own URL (“yahoo.com/myusername”) represents an OpenID identity.

The URI “yahoo.com” represents a corporation, not an individual; “yahoo.com/myusername” represents an identity. It’s unique. When I’m looking to sign in to a site, even if I knew what OpenID was, I would never guess that “yahoo.com” was the OpenID URI.

Who are you?

I’m “marcuscavanaugh.com”.

Who are you?

I’m “yahoo.com/marcuscavanaugh”.

Who are you?

I’m “yahoo.com”. (Huh?)

We must teach users that a URL is their online homebase.¹ If users learn that they have their own homepage URL, it’s not too hard to follow through that “OpenID means you type your URL into the box.”

OpenID won’t take hold magically; it will require some education to teach users to use OpenID. But users will understand OpenID better if they’re asked the right question:

Q: Who’s your OpenID provider?

A: Uh…

Q: What’s your homepage?

A: Oh yeah, it’s myusername.blogspot.com.