For those who've never heard of it before, Mozilla Persona is a single sign-on method that's pretty strict on privacy. For me, as a website administrator, it means that I don't need to ask the user for any password, which in turn means that I can get rid of the traditional registration process; I just ask the user to sign in, and if it's their first time on my website I generate a new account.
And therein lies the problem: by now, users seem to expect the traditional registration process. I have to tell new users two things:
- they should just log in using their email address even though they're not registered, against their expectation, and
- if they don't have a Persona-enabled email address (most likely) and they're not registered with the Mozilla fallback option (also very likely, as the service is very new), they have to register there instead.
These too points seem very complicated to explain casually without lengthy texts that would probably make a lot of users just browse somewhere else. How can I use integrate this scheme into my website (as the sole login mechanism) and still make the whole process as straight-forward as possible?