Last week Canonical hosted the GNOME Usability Hackfest in London. Some interesting research was done and there's a lot of awesome improvements coming to the "Control Center”, Nautilus and Gnome 3. I hope Ruben Vermeersch's wish for a yearly GNOME Usability Hackfest will come true. I won't try to summarize everything that happened, but I will encourage you to read the blogpost I've linked to below. If you want the summarized version ArsTechnic has a nice article titled "Task Pooper" could revolutionize GNOME desktop".

Thomas Wood: Usability Hackfest London

Seth Nickell: Early peak into Gnome 3’s potential

Máirín Duffy: Adding Chapters to Totem

Not really related to the Hackfest, but related in the sense of improving the user interface of the Nautilus file manager.