Why Benugo's at St Pancras (and Open ID) will fail as currently designed

As you race towards the trains at London's stations, with 10 minutes or so to spare, you can usually count on grabbing something to eat from one of the fast food stalls near the platform (thats Track to my US readers). The St Pancras station seems to offer that fast food heaven, the "healthy" option - Benugos - where you can choose fresh meats, salads etc on panini bread rather than a "burger wif' coke". Its in pole position, being closest to the ticket barriers. A licence to print money, you may think...

Hah! Let me describe the order-fulfilment process.

First, you stand in a queue to order your delightful concoction. Only problem is, there are people in it in front of you umming and ahing about what they want. For my New York readers, you need to understand that in London the servers do not move on to the next person on the second Ummm....and in fact the server side is usually undermanned. Anyway, once you have decide what order you want to sign up to, you are asked to walk to another counter, about 10m away, and.....

....join another queue to pay. Same issues with undermanning. Once you have paid, you go back to the first counter, where (hopefully) your order has been prepared (by the overloaded server system) and thus queue a third time to get it.

Now, this is probably barely acceptable except for ladies and gentlemen of leisure in normal situations, but at a railway station where people have got but a few minutes, it has two effects:

- Firstly, the slow process time reduces the rate of revenue input - a McBurgerChicken would have done 4 or 5 people in that time. So its low productivity for its high rental

- Secondly, it limits the total revenue - I, and many others in the queue/s said "sod that for a game of soldiers" and ran for the trains or other further away food options

This is, as they say, no way to run a railway cafe.

But, whats this got to do with Open ID, I hear you ask? Well, just that the method of signon is like Benugo - and in my view that is its biggest drawback for adoption. Never mind the quality (security etc) issues, just get a one-stop-shop workflow going. We are as impatient and hurried on the Inter networks as the Inter rails.

Open ID must be like Burger King, not Benugo !

This is my contribution to the discussions about User Research coming out from various worthy organisations today, and that they are looking at ways of doing single sign-on.

(I saw this great comment on WebMonkey by the way: "Why not make a firefox plugin that you can use to login to every stupid site that asks for you to register. I even have a good name for it, you could call it bugmenot. Pretty clever right?")