You must have some very low standards for "looking great". Like they say, this is a prototype and it shows. The design is all over the place. The one thing that sticks out the most is that there is no sense of scale at all. Everything is either ridiculously huge or tiny.
For example, look at the compact status bar: really small text and icons. Then look at the navigation icons on the bottom of the screen, the dialer tab icons, the contact pictures: all huge. But then there's the text next to each contact picture: tiny again.
Ah, the good old "submit a patch if you don't like it". This is a common problem all throughout the user interface shown, not an isolated issue. And as mentioned, it's a _prototype_: I'm going to give them the benefit of the doubt and say this is far, far from the final user interface anyway.
In the end, it is a community effort. It needs people from the community to contribute. If you think you can do something better, I really encourage you to do so.
UI design - how would someone with strong views (and experience!) on gestures and UI features but with little coding experience get involved? Just put some mocks somewhere and post them to where the UI team meet?
Edit: In fact, where do the people interested in UI design actually meet and make their sausages in KDE? I can't seem to find a central place similar to http://design.canonical.com/
There is this gap between having the programming knowledge to 'submit a patch' and other kinds of large scale organisation/design skill.
And the UIs for all this stuff are going to be done in QML, and if you can do HTML and CSS QML is much easier and more intuitive. It puts all the animations, gestures, etc in the QML files and they have a visual designer in QtQuick so you don't actually need to write code at all if you don't want to.
Thanks for pointing out that page. I'd not found much but then I was searching for 'user interface testing' &c.
"The goal of the KDE VDG is to create a central point for all visual design work – a one-stop for all KDE's visual design needs, if its logo's, icons, visuals, illustrations, launch pages, plasma themes or presentation and promo-material."
Above from the 'what' page on that site. Might be just my expectations but I read that Web site as being about branding and visual design rather than UI and workflows.
The 'who' page mini-bios do not appear to have anyone from a UI / workflow background - or is it that am I just out of date with the job titles that cover those skills these days?
