Let's face it: the UI isn't great. That's not your fault, it's kind of saddled with many uTorrent-esque things.

But there are designs which do work:
https://github.com/urandom/gearshift

These guys have put together a great one. Whether by collaboration with them to utilise their design, or just by poking through their source files, it could be imitated.

I notice that there's a feature request on their page to add uTorrent support, which might make mapping the actions more straightforward.