Making a good UI requires that you have some sort of central list of guiding UI principles, and the wherewithal and authority to enforce it.
That means you need a team to:
- Come up with a detailed set of UI principles and guidelines
- Test that they're sane
- Enforce them across the entire system
Steps one and two require user interface experts, who're probably already getting paid good money to do principle UI design at Apple or Microsoft.
Open source without a backing company will have a particularly hard time with step three, because these projects tend to be communal and at least a little fragmented/disjoint by nature.
That means you need a team to:
- Come up with a detailed set of UI principles and guidelines
- Test that they're sane
- Enforce them across the entire system
Steps one and two require user interface experts, who're probably already getting paid good money to do principle UI design at Apple or Microsoft.
Open source without a backing company will have a particularly hard time with step three, because these projects tend to be communal and at least a little fragmented/disjoint by nature.
Mainly you just need money.