Recently, my interest of the project moves to the single sign-on systems. And Digital identity: How users value the attributes of online identifiers is the article explains how to use conjoint analysis to measure users’ valuation of this kind of identity management system.
First of all, consideration of the value of users in this article is very helpful for my research. It reminds me to focus more on people’s opinion of value of IDM issues in the first stage of primary research, such as during interviews and user journey map research. Understand users’ value should be the important start to understand the project.
Second, this article mentions the cost to switch information from separate organizations to one system. That’s something I didn’t consider much before. The cost may contain both users’ and organizations’, which may effect the single sign-on service a lot.
And talking about the single sign-one system, it mentions Passport service of Microsoft in this article, and I know IBM provides the similar concept mainly for company use. Therefore there may be many examples of big companies offering single sign-on systems to be researched as case studies for the project.
In this article, conjoint analysis is the main method to measure users’ valuation of IDM issue. This method seems too complex for me to understand but the attributes mentioned in the survey and the final conclusion is useful. The attributes and their levels used in the survey contain many parts of identity management including service providers (reputation), industry sectors, monthly cost, private information, security level, coverage of identifier and switching. And in the conclusion, the author says users show “a strong willingness to pay for higher levels of security”, “users strongly value increasing scope” and “there are high switching costs in the market for identifiers for a substantial portion of the population”.
From the conclusion it also arises a question to me. How to consider the price for IDM service? Will people feel better or worse of pay for identity security? Do people believe free service with a high level security? And is that costs much to build a high security level for identity management?
Zoe Yin Design Thinking 