Anyhow, here is my mockup and suggestions, mostly aimed at being not-that-hard to implement while providing high "bang for buck" ratio:
First think you will notice is minimap at bottom left, different menu panel.
Menu panel is transparent and resizable by dragging splitter. Semi-transparent menu allows to see-thorough to display more of map.
Minimap acts typically for game of this type - click to change location, drag to drag map. Main map display can also be dragged.
Main Maps can also reacts to mouse gestures: Same gesture that would send web-broswer back/forward is used for moving up/down layer. Aditional gestures to be determined by how often certain fucntionality is needed. Ideal is to use mouse for navigation and keyboard to issuing commands or fine control.
Menu. As you can see, we see menu for selected workshop: Worskhop being selected by made obvious by shape that links it to menu.
Most radical change is leaving curses behind and taking advantge of actually being able to draw instead of just printing text. This allows for best information density in menus, map and minimap, each of which has different needs.
Menu has several conventions:
1) Shortcuts are highlighted by red color, if shortcut is not simple (a letter that is part of command word), it is in brackets following text. Unless command is not avaiable: in that case it is grayed.
2) All commands (=line of text with highlighted shortcut) can also be clicked by mouse.
3) Use of dark green section separators is made.
4) Workshop in this example has "Status" text that spells out relevant info, blue items in this text are hyperlinks, when clicked they will select Creature/Item it refers to.
Player interested in looking where Urist, the sand bag thief, is would only have to click his name to select him.
In fact, anywhere game mentions creature or item in plain text, it works like hyperlink.
5) There is meta-menu on left of worshop diplay: it is used to change mode of selection and to cycle selectables.
It has nothing to do with object we are looking at, so it is set aside. Anytime game needs to have "sidebar" dedicated to navigation or metainformations, it will be rendered aside in this format.
6) Colors
I went for "flesh gold" text color as default as it is warm and inviting for newbies and more grand to look at for veterans. Dark green to separate sections and to render clutter text that needs to be there to help with dividing content. Guess shortcut red could be less intense. Blue to highlight selection in menus and to highligh hyperlink outside menus.