I am building an Windows Forms application that will have to select a single style of a particular device, but each style has a variety of unrelated configuration options that must be chosen. The options will configure a particular data transmission device.
I created somewhat of a mockup of what I'm initially thinking. In this model, selecting a radio button on the left will select the pane on the right. It will basically work like tab controls, except I need to make it clear than only the actively visible 'tab' is important, and the others are to be ignored.
Each tab has items that are fundamentally unrelated to any items on any other panes.
I considered having all options visible, with only the fields relevant to the selected radio button enabled, but I think that will be too busy and frightening for many users.
The concept is kind of similar to how when setting up PuTTY, you select your connection type, and only one is used once the program is running, but each type has a variety of configuration settings specific to only a particular connection type. While the way putty does it works fine for people like us, that would be way too confusing for the typical users of this application.
Is there a better alternative to this kind of model?