Bill Barnes is CardCarrying

Bill  Barnes is more responsible for crafting the Cardspace user experience than anyone on our team.  Now, he's not only working on next generation Cardspace, but tackling the user experience issues that arise when integrating InfoCards into web sites (e.g. “how to build a relying party?”.  Of course, this is an on-going project and – great news – he'll be using his new CardCarrying blog to express his thinking and develop ideas.  For those interested in InfoCards, this is a “must-subscribe”.  Here's his take on what he's doing: 

Information Cards are a new approach to digital identity. So new that I’ve noticed an interesting phenomenon – in the hundred or so times I’ve presented our idea, to audiences of all kinds, it always takes the better part of an hour to convey. Sometimes more. And I’m a good speaker.

This shouldn't be surprising. They’re new, and one would expect the concepts to take a while to sink in. I remember the first time I saw the World Wide Web, then just a few months old. I just didn’t get it. My friend did a very admirable job as visionary, but it didn’t click. Same thing with TiVo. Again, I’m not dumb, not that dumb anyway, but new ideas take a while to filter in.

And Information Cards have it worse. They’re not just new, they’re different, and different is harder. You don’t just have to learn, you have to unlearn. This helps explain why security experts often take the longest to grasp what we’re doing – we’re forcing them to go back to first principles, and for many of them that’s a long way back. But even my mom has to unlearn passwords, and that won’t happen instantly.

I love to talk, I do. So I don’t mind speaking for the better part of an hour if that’s what it takes to get someone up to speed. But I have two jobs. My busy schedule simply won’t allow me to teach Information Cards to every man, woman, and child on the Internet today. How are we going to educate them? More to the point, how will website X, which thinks supporting Information Cards will garner more customers from increased security and convenience, educate them?

The good news is, not everyone needs to understand the end-to-end meta-architecture. They just need to understand what they need to make it work. One of the reasons we adopted the Card metaphor was that it brings with it some intuition. Hopefully, then, a given website won’t have to do very much explanation.

Here’s what I think they need to know, in language that I am continuing to develop. My hope is that, with these few key concepts under their belt, the flow of the website plus the user experience of their identity selector, be it Windows CardSpace or a competitor, will be clear enough to take them the rest of the way. So, without further ado:

Information Cards are like digital versions of the cards in your wallet. You can make personal cards for signing in to websites – they are like passwords but are much harder to steal. Personal cards are stored on your computer, and you can use a single card to sign into multiple websites.

You can also download managed cards from organizations like banks, associations, and businesses. When you want to prove something about yourself to a website, for instance “I am a member of club X” or “I work for company Y”, show that website a managed card. A managed card is stored on your computer, but the information it conveys is not.

These are the key points I think people need to understand. And the second part, managed cards, isn’t necessary if your site doesn’t take managed cards, and that’s most of them out of the gate. So really it’s one paragraph, three sentences, four or five concepts.

Don’t get me wrong, I think four or five concepts is a lot, and I don’t expect everyone to get it right away. I think inevitably what will happen is that a small group of geeks will learn these concepts deeply, and start to evangelize them in the blogosphere, in media, and to their parents. A good analogy here is RSS. My experience in that hardly anyone outside the technorati knows what it is yet, and very few people will bootstrap themselves simply by seeing that magic orange square. Conversions happen one at a time, from one satisfied (and informed) customer to another. My mom will use Information Cards because I tell her why she should.

I have heard some other great ideas about educating people. More on these later. Meanwhile, let me know how you would educate a user at your website on what Information Cards are, and why they should use them at your website. Would you use my language or a variant thereof? Share the love.

Oh, one more thing. I’m not speaking in an official capacity here, but I don’t think it’s reasonable to expect Microsoft or anyone else to mount a giant P.R. education campaign on Information Cards, any more than you would expect them or anyone else to convince you to use RSS. If it’s really a good technology (and I think it is) it will succeed because it is in everyone’s benefit when it is used. So I think everyone shares the educational burden. So get teaching.