An empirical study on the usability of logout in a single sign-on system

Abstract

Single sign-on (SSO) has shown to be a successful paradigm in a network environment where a large number of passwords would otherwise be required. However, the SSO paradigm leaves the practices of logging out of services undetermined. In this study, the users' subjective satisfaction in the current implementation of login and logout was examined with both quantitative and qualitative methods. The study was carried out in a university using SSO in its intranet. The main result of this study is that when a multiservice environment uses SSO for user authentication, a single logout should also be used instead of expecting users to separately log out from each service. © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2005.