RE: ACTION-335 logotypes and ISSUE-96 discussion

I have never had the slightest difficulty selling the idea of logotypes to customers. The problem is purely on the application side. The logos have no value unless they are displayed.
 
So we risk a chicken and egg situation where the application side people refuse to do anything about implementation until they are assured that there will be 100% adoption by the site owners which is not going to happen until there are applications to present the logos.
 
Someone has to make the first move, we cannot gate the scope of what we will consider by requiring an assurance of total adoption by any market participant.

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From: public-wsc-wg-request@w3.org on behalf of Ian Fette
Sent: Fri 09/11/2007 4:49 PM
To: W3C WSC Public
Subject: ACTION-335 logotypes and ISSUE-96 discussion


This action (ACTION-335) was to provide discussion topics for ISSUE-96. I only really have one point, and I will try to state it more clearly than at the meeting. 

To me, the effectiveness of any of the logotype proposals (or the EV proposals, for that matter) depends greatly upon the adoption of these technologies by sites. We can do really cool flashy things when we get an EV cert, or an EV-cert with a logo, but right now the only two sites I can find using an EV cert are PayPal and VeriSign. Therefore, I wonder how habituated people would become in practice, if they never (or rarely) saw the EV/logotype interface stuff in use. 

My proposal is that any usability testing of the EV and/or logotype things in the spec not only reflect how users would behave in a land where everyone is using EV-certs and life is happy, but rather also test a more realistic case. That is, look at what the adoption is presently and/or what we can reasonably expect it to be at time of last call, and do usability testing in an environment that reflects that adoption rate - i.e. some percentage of sites using EV certs, some percentage also using logos, and another percentage still using "normal" SSL certs. My worry is that we may be thinking "EV certs will solve X,Y, and Z", but that may only be the case if users are used to seeing them on the majority of sites, and should that not end up being the case, we need to look at the usability and benefit in that scenario as well. 

I think this is what the ACTION wanted, i.e. for me to state this point more explicitly. I am going to therefore assume that my work on this action is complete, unless I hear otherwise.

-Ian