Identity Systems: white labeling is a no-go

There’s a new blog post with some criticism of Mozilla Persona, the easy and secure web login solution that my team works on. The great thing about working in the open at Mozilla is that we get this kind of criticism openly, and we respond to it openly, too.

The author’s central complaint is that the Persona brand is visible to the user:

It [Persona] needs white-labeling. I know that branding drives adoption, but showing the Persona name on the login box at all is too much; it needs to be transparent for the user. Most of the visits to any website are first-time visits, which means the user is seeing your site/brand for the first time. Introducing another brand at the sign-up point is a confusing distraction to the user.

The author compares Persona to Stripe, the payment company with a super-easy-to-use JavaScript API, which lets a web site display a payment form with no trace of the Stripe brand, and all the hard credit-card processing work is left to the Stripe service.

This is an interesting point, but unfortunately it is wrong for an Identity solution. Consider if Persona were fully white-labeled, integrated into the web site’s own pages, with no trace of the Persona system visible to the user. What happens then? Two possibilities:

1. no user state is shared between sites: users create a new account on every site that uses Persona. The site doesn’t have to do the hard work of password storage, it can let Persona handle this. There’s no benefit to the user: every web site looks independent from the others, with its own account and password. And while this is incrementally better than having web sites store passwords themselves, that increment is quite small: web sites tend to use federated authentication solutions if they can lower the friction of users signing up. If users still have to create accounts everywhere, friction is high, and the benefit to the web site is small.
2. user state is shared between sites: users don’t have to create new accounts at every web site, they can use their existing single Persona account, but now they have no branding whatsoever to indicate this. So, are users supposed to type in the same Persona password on every site they see? Are they supposed to feel good about seeing their list of identities embedded within a brand new site they’ve never seen before, with no indication of why that data is already there? This is a recipe for disastrous phishing and a deeply jarring user experience.

So what about Stripe? With Stripe, the user retypes their credit-card number at every web site they visit. That makes sense because the hard part of payment processing for web sites isn’t so much the prompting for a credit card, it’s the actual payment processing in the backend. And, frankly, it would be quite jarring if you saw your credit card number just show up on a brand new web site you’ve never visited before.

But identity is different. The hard part is not the backend processing, it’s getting the user to sign up in the first place, and for that you really want the user to not have to create yet another account. Plus, if you’re going to surface the user’s identity across sites, then you *have* to give them an indication of the system that’s helping them do that so they know what password to type in and why their data is already there. And that’s Persona. Built to provide clear benefits to users and sites.

By the way, though we need some consistent Persona branding to make a successful user experience, we don’t need the Persona brand to be overbearing. Already, with Persona, web sites can add a prominent logo of their choosing to the Persona login screen. And we’re working on new approaches that would give sites even more control over the branding, while giving users just the hint they need to understand that this is the same login system they trust everywhere else. Check it out.