No wonder that the user has a
hard time handling his or her identities effectively! It is like trying
to understand the paths that planets follow in the night sky
without knowing that the Earth itself spins and everything revolves
around the Sun. Without the latter information, those
paths are extremely dif?¬?cult to understand and predict. Adopting
the new perspective, however, makes everything crystal clear.
If we want to solve the problem of identity management for
good, we need to be like Galileo and rebuild the system on the
basis of the fundamental identity mechanics we have discovered
so far. That will lead to a more natural and effective way for
users to think about identity. Pro?¬?ciency in managing it will
follow suit.
The ?¬?rst thing we can do is make the concept of identity explicit
for users. A user should be able to think about his or her identities
as clearly as he or she thinks about his or her ?¬?les, documents
and any other abstract entity that has a visual
representation in a user experience.
Once the identities are explicitly represented, we have made an
enormous step forward. Users can now create identities for all
the contexts and the hats they wear: identities for web mail and
low-value services, identities as employees of a certain company,
identities as citizens of a certain country, identities as
members of a dating service, identities as alumni of a certain
Again, control is
key.
Pages:
173
174
175
176
177
178
179
180
181
182
183
184
185
186
187
188
189
190
191
192
193
194
195
196
197