Your spot on about the UI/UE, it is a serious weak point. It is a pretty big gap in my own skill set (which by iterating on this site, I am hoping to improve).
I think the core competency of the site is meme tracking for a given vertical category. Given that, the thought is additional features can be added that leverage the memes.
Some examples I am thinking of short term:
-Which memes are having the biggest impact on social networks (in terms of "tweets", "likes", "diggs", etc..).
-What media, such as videos and images, are associated with a particular meme.
Longer term:
-Given a list of sites and article I track on say, Google Reader, only show me the entries which are part of significant memes.
-What memes are my friends "liking", "tweeting", or "digging", etc...
-Topic search which returns memes rather than single articles.
The overarching plan is to release early, and often -- and hopefully to update the folks here at Hacker News to make a good feedback loop.