How do you deal with groups of controls that are dependent on a group of radio buttons? Do you put each group of controls below the applicable radio button so that they have proximity but then the radio buttons do not:

…or do you show and hide the controls based on which radio button is selected:

…or do you pansy out and just make an advanced button?

But then again do you put the advanced button where I slapped it on at the far right side of the dialog, or perhaps on the bottom right of the dialog, or should it be under each radio button where it applies?

Back to the point…

With the first radio button method, you have similarity between the radio buttons to help link them together as interrelated, but you lose proximity. With the second method, you have proximity and similarity, but you’ve just created a dialog that’s harder to develop and maintain, let alone the dialog sizing problems you would have if one radio button has a lot of options and another radio button has none. The third method eliminates all those, but then may not be completely obvious to the user to which radio button the advanced button belongs to and in which cases it applies… and also it sucks. (I can’t even imagine an application where every radio button’d dialog forked off into another dialog.)

Why is this so difficult?

There are simply no established rules for this stuff. Sure it may depend on your specific dialog and the type and amount of information you need to convey to the user, but can’t we all try to do it in a fairly consistent manner?

But then again what hope do we have when we can’t even get the OK/Cancel/Close buttons in the same place:

Nice, huh? Anyway, I think I still favor the first method displayed above…

…but what do you think?