On hi rez - many people's pc's don't run the game well. But if you have a small screen or a laptop like I do, there is no way to reduce the UI footprint. It should be made minimizable; ie the button area, info area and map separately. Angling it works to an some extent but its just not suited for my taste.
On another note, the columns for various info such as ships, planets, colonies should be made movable just as in any windows app, so we could fit more when using custom layouts. Since the column width is fixed, there is wasted space I could use to put another selected column into.