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The following is a list of features/needs which we feel would make a good User Interface / User Interface framework.  Since not all of these features/needs would have the same importance, we've categorized some as "required", "recommended" or "optional".

1. Open Source (required): Obviously. Also we need to avoid GPL and similar licenses which are incompatible with BSD.
2. Easy to run "out-of-the-box" (required): in keeping with DSpace Vision, any UI or UI framework must be easy to get running "out-of-the-box".
   
3. Ease of UI Customization (required): a UI should be relatively easy to customize for institutions. At a minimum, institutions should be able to easily swap out the header/footer/color scheme of the default UI. Ideally, the UI would support third-party themes (e.g. Bootstrap themes from http://bootswatch.com/ or similar) which can be easily applied to the UI to change its entire look and feel.
4. Responsive Web Design (required) : a UI should be responsive, adapting to the size of various devices.
   1. Bootstrap support (recommended): Ideally, the UI would support Bootstrap, since it is one of the most widely used and supported responsive frameworks
5. HTML5 Support (required): a UI should be able to support HTML5.  Ideally, it is built primarily with HTML5 in mind, rather than only supporting some aspects of HTML5.
6. REST API friendly (highly recommended): a UI should be built with the idea of "separation of concerns".  For example, the UI framework should include NO business logic or Database query logic, etc. It should also have no knowledge of the underlying storage framework (e.g. Database schemas, file storage locations, etc).  Instead, ideally it would  communicate with DSpace primarily through the REST API (and other similar layers, e.g. Solr or Elastic Search). It would NEVER communicate directly with the database or other underlying storage layers.
7. Faceted/Filtered Search/Browse friendly (highly recommended):  a UI should easily integrate with a faceted/filtered search engine/server (such as Solr pr Elastic Search) or a generic API which can communicate with said faceted/filtered search engine (e.g. Discovery, Blacklight)
8. Rapid Development support / Developer friendly (highly recommended): a UI should be easy to develop against and improve upon. Ideally in a popular technology or language.  Local developers should not need to go through extensive training to work with the UI. The framework and technology ideally should be widely used, so that newer developers can also quickly come up to speed.  (Some examples: Ruby on Rails is a popular widely used technology/language. As is, seemingly, the Java Play! framework. Both are obviously much more widely used and easier to develop with than say Apache Cocoon)
9. Active, third party plugin ecosystem (highly recommended): a UI framework should ideally come with an active plugin/module/tool ecosystem. This is not only the sign of a strong community around the UI framework, but also eases the development burden on DSpace developers, as we no longer need to build all features specific to DSpace.  (For example, a UI framework that came with its own, third-party Authentication plugins would allow us to utilize that rather than building our own plugins for Shib/LDAP, etc)

UI framework options / analysis

Here's a few possible UI frameworks which we may wish to analyze for a single future UI.  A much larger listing of various web application frameworks appears on Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_web_application_frameworks

Please feel free to add more that you feel would be worth analyzing for DSpace!