Wednesday, February 22, 2006

Identity gestures?

I use the Firefox extension All-in-One Gestures for common browser operations like new tab, close tab, history backwards, history forwards, etc. Rather than searching through menus, or right clicking on some browser widget, you need only mouse click somewhere in the window and then draw a designated gesture with your mouse.

For instance, the current tab can be closed by right clicking within and then dragging the mouse down. You even get a nice mouse trail to help you draw the right shape. There are as many distinct operations as permutations of up, down, left, right operations (view frame source is 'left-down-right-down-left', like I'm going to remember that one).

Why not 'identity gestures' - oft repeated identity operations that can be initiated through user-configurable mouse gestures? Some candidate operations (some presuming an 'active' client) and potential default gestures:

  • toggle preferred/active identity provider (perhaps 't')
  • log in with local SP account (perhaps 's')
  • log out of all active sessions (perhaps an 'X')
  • verify site credentials (perhaps 'T')
  • display current site's usage policy for requested attributes (perhaps a '?')
  • add individual (as indicated through their name on a page) to those who can share some resource, e.g. photo, blog comment (perhaps a '+')
  • log in with Passport account (perhaps 'When in the Course of human events, it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands')

If we don't make identity easy, they won't use it.

1 comment:

Pat Patterson said...

'left-down-right-down-left' - drawing a big 'S' :-)

Pat