How should Ubuntu look and work in 2010?

Starting with 8.10, we (Canonical) plan to take a more active role in defining the overall experience people have when using Ubuntu. We are doing this by defining how Ubuntu should look and work in 2010, and articulating a roadmap to get there by 10.04 LTS.

Canonical will commit resources to the upstream development of much of this experience — but to the extent we can get community participation from Gnome and other projects, we hope to see this land upstream even faster.

Startup, login, logout, sleep, shutdown

How do you sign in as a specific user, in cases where there are up to six local user accounts on the system? Where is the signed-in account displayed in the interface? How do you log out? How do you shut down, hibernate, or sleep? Consider hardware-specific factors like opening or closing the laptop lid, and pressing the power button.

Switching accounts

Ubuntu is a multi-user system. How does someone sit down at an existing, logged-in desktop, and switch to their own account?

Notifications

How should the system tell you when something urgent happens? Examples: your battery is full, your battery is 25% empty, you have 15 minutes battery left, you must shut down or plug in immediately, your wifi has disconnected, your system needs to restart, there are new security updates available, a buddy is sending you instant messages.

Status

How does the system tell you about general status? For example, what is the time and date? Are you on the network? Do you have new email? What user are you logged in as? Is your sound muted?

What is running at the moment?

How do you know what applications are running at the moment? Is it important that you do know?

Switching applications and tabs

How do you switch between running applications, and the tabs within those applications? There are several different user interface styles, from multiple-document to tabbed, is it possible for us to unify the "switch work focus" experience?

Launching applications

How do you start Firefox, or Skype? How do you launch the tool to configure your wifi or network or display - is that an application, or is it somehow special?

Connecting to Wifi or 3G network

How do you connect to a 3G network, or Wifi network? How do you know what your network signal strength is? How do you know if you have dropped off the network? How do you reconnect?

Access to files and folders

How do you find files or folders? Where are downloaded files sent, or email attachments saved? How do you find them? Where do you go to see what's on the USB key you just inserted into the computer? Or on the camera you just attached?