We found that NGUI for unity has a small learning curve. We picked it up quickly, and started building the overall experience using this plugin.
Hurricane designed the mockups for the experience based on the style choices we made last week, and the related GUI skin.
This helped us gain a lot of mileage in our work. We have completed building upto selecting species as a parent.
However, later in the week, we found a bug that prevented TouchScript to work with NGUI, specifically when we changed the scene in code.
This bug set us back, and we were forced to come up with a workaround which may get tedious to implement in later scenes. We have also posted this question on several online forums, to check if there is a solution to this.