Here is a design mockup of the game ui, basicaly done just to get an idea of how it might look.
The ui will consists of 2 main parts.
The Inventory:
The Inventory is an expandable 'bar' of inventory items, when you pick up an item it goes into this bar.
Clicking on an item makes you 'hold' the item.
The Radial Menus
The Radial Menus are context-senstive action choices, when you click on somthing in the game world you are presented with a list of actions, such as.
Look At,Take,Push,Pull
Talk To,Open,Close,Use
Pretty standard stuff.
Furthermore, if you have an item in-hand it chances the potential list, take this for example:
If you are holding a key and you click on a door, your options are likely to be.
'open door with key'
In this example:
you are holding a crowbar, and you click on a person, your options might be.
'beat man with crowbar'
'give crowbar to man'
pretty standard adventure stuff; the goals for the UI are to make it exceptionally intuitive, graphically appealing, and really contribute to the gameplay (through a wealth of potential options)
Your design seems to come heavily from old Lucas Arts adventure games -- a good thing -- but reminds me the most of the MI3 UI design.
So what is wrong with that? Well, the puzzles in the old SCUMM engine's were more intuitive because there was a FINITE number of actions that could be performed. Unlike MI3, where there were many unknown scripted actions based on item to item context.
You see, renaming the generic actions for context sensitivity isn't bad at all. Infact, it makes the game much more appealing. Instead of having something read "put oil on gear", I would rather read "lather oil on gear." Context sensitive, but in this case, synonyms for the same action.
What happened in MI3 was that they often would use verbs that were NOT SYNONYMS for any of the typical SCUMM actions. You would think to yourself of the generic SCUMM actions you could take, and realize it didn't make sense with any of the items you had. But because the items were context sensitive, all of a sudden an item would gain a special property action -- and it wasn't just a synonym change. Sure, I suppose you could claim that "use" is generic enough a verb from SCUMM that any action constitutes a synonym change -- but we all know that is a fairly tongue-in-cheek argument.
Unfortunately, I can't actually think of a specific example from MI3, but I think you know what I am talking about.
So remember -- context based synonyms for typical SCUMM actions good, random new context based actions bad.
Good luck man.