The battle to encourage publishers to offer single sign on has been won but the war is far from over in terms of making the user experience an easy one. Discovery to delivery is fraught with problems, with Service Providers failing to display empathy with their users, offering bewildering and irrelevant options and not enough information as to where a user is in the access process. Very often the user gets so lost that they never manage to access the e-resource at all. Presenting IdP Discovery in an easy to understand and user-friendly fashion is the most difficult issue to solve when using federated Authentication to authorize access to e-resources.
This presentation details some of the more common pitfalls when implementing IdP discovery with a walk through showing how good and bad practise can turn out. It goes on to outline the guidance developed by the REFEDS community to assist in the deployment of consistent and intuitive IdP discovery in accordance with the NISO ESPRESSO standard. With little effort and nearly zero ongoing cost a site can guide users through authentication easily and quickly.
This is a call to arms to e-publishers to implement easy IdP Discovery and hence retain users.