One of the highlights of CIS this year was a panel of the keynote speakers hosted by Ron Miller, enterprise reporter from TechCrunch. Andre Durand, CEO, Ping Identity; Alex Simons, director of program management, Microsoft; Ian Glazer, senior director of Identity, Salesforce.com; Bob Blakley, global head of information security innovation, Citigroup; Eric Sachs, product manager director, Identity, Google; and Pamela Dingle, principal technology architect, Ping Identity joined Ron for a lively discussion on the future of identity. They tackled tough questions and offered unique points of view that left the audience thinking about where we are now, and what we need to do to achieve our goals of making identity a key component of our lives online.

It is difficult to capture the dynamic conversation into a few highlights, so we are publishing this recap in a three part series. Today we're looking at one of the biggest topics at CIS this year: user experience. To watch the full video go here.

"We have this (terrible) pervasive opinion that users are stupid and cannot change, and that friction is the thing that we must bow down to as some sort of heathen god. That friction leads us to not being willing to be creative and try new things that users may actually embrace better than the old standby." - Pamela Dingle

"In the tradeoff between convenience and security, there's an opportunity for us to be clever about how we use smart platforms that are in front of us. We didn't have these six, seven years ago and now we do. It's a new era for us to figure out as an industry how we take the burden off the user yet improve the security all around the system." - Andre Durand

"I have on average 2 UX designers for every product manager on my team. We found that we're making more progress than we thought we could on a lot of the things we thought we couldn't get users to do. I would say it's progress, but man is it brutally hard."- Eric Sachs

"We always have to keep UX in mind. If I'm forcing you as an end user to learn a new thing, it better be worth learning that new thing. It's like getting into a BMW and they've changed the layout of the automatic stick. If you get into a car when they've messed around with [something as fundamental as the gear shift], 15 minutes later, maybe you're on the road again. That change isn't worth the work to learn it. You have to have that tradeoff in mind. People know what to do with a username and a password box -- we have to keep that in mind that as we change things, incremental little changes that make you learn aren't necessarily good. We've got to find and experiment with big things that make it worth it for you to go 'okay I'm going to learn this new thing,' and then we need to use it consistently across the industry." - Alex Simons

"We've had three decades of habituating users on a certain set of ceremonies. You don't just undo that If you always put your pants on left leg then right leg for 30 years in a row and then are being told that you have to jump into both, that's a real hard shift." - Ian Glazer

"The combination of whatever the improvement in ceremony is and the perceived friction, to the reward (which is unlocking a lot of things), all of the sudden changes. We haven't done a good job at connecting the friction that we put in front of people with what they're going to get... Once we connect the dots between the friction and the reward I do think people will be more receptive to it." - Andre Durand

"I'll be surprised if a year from now, if everyone in the room hasn't had numerous experiences where if you walk up to a PC and its logged you in, or you put your thumb on your phone and it logs in. It's starting to really feel much more natural. We are on the cusp of it getting radically better pretty quickly." - Alex Simons

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Ping Identity is simplifying the authentication user experience for companies, employees and their customers. Ping solutions come in a variety of flavors, since authentication needs vary depending on the scenario -- especially as we continue to introduce new device types to the enterprise. PingID provides one-swipe access on mobile phones and the AppleWatch, and can also be used in tandem with Yubico's YubiKey, a small hardware device that offers two-factor authentication with a simple touch of a button.

Come back next week, when we'll look at identity standards & cooperation in Part 2 of the series.