UDS Day Five: Vudu

Vudu
This morning at UDS I attended a session that was about making life easier for users by leveraging community knowledge about completing tasks. Scott Lavender and I spoke about his idea last night and it gained enough traction to become a session by the next day. For an example if a user wanted to correct a photo that was ‘too dark’ they would have a suggested set of actions come up in hud that would complete the task. System problems, such as wireless driver problems, were also discussed. The idea there is the system could automatically attempt to fix the problem.

As names were being thrown out someone threw out Voodoo and it seemed like the name was well received. I suggested a slight change to fit with Juju; Vudu would keep the ‘sound’ of the name, but match the name construction of the Juju. I even mocked up a very rough logo.

quick draft vudu logo

Intents
As we were talking about Vudu I started to wonder about leveraging user intents both inside and outside of applications. When a user selects a file they would have the options based on possible intents; publish to twitter or Google+, edit with the GIMP or Inkscape, etc.

Both of these ideas would be an incredible leap in usability for Ubuntu users. I look forward to working with Scott Lavender and others to see if these ideas can be implemented; perhaps by 13.04.