I would love to be able to simplify the connections between major entities in my diagram. Grouping doesn’t really satisfy this need. For example, if I have a prerequisite tree with some branches and things, there’s a lot of analysis in the middle that I want to hide for a minute. I want to look at only the beginning and the end. For example, I may want to focus on figuring out if there are more objectives, or whether those milestones are, in fact, ready without additional obstacles to overcome (and the middle space is already "solved). Or, I may simply want to walk through it with someone else after my analysis and progressively disclose additional details to them as we discuss my analysis.
Imgur: The magic of the Internet (btw there are 3 pictures at that imgur post)
(2nd picture) Grouping can’t accomplish this, because the arrows are broken by the group. Without incremental layout, these arrows aren’t likely to connect “across” the group, and most diagrams are more complicate than that anyway and it becomes hard to follow more than five or six lines “through” the group. However, the simplicity of this view is wonderful for my objectives right now.
And the third picture behind that imgur link is a mockup of what I’d like, faking the spacing using the edge annotations and an AND to represent the minimized items. It’s not important enough right now to see the descriptions, but I do want to see that there is more to unfold. And I do not want to move text in between entities and annotations to accomplish this; that’s too much diagram management. And besides what’s missing is that there are multiple levels that one annotation can’t reveal. Ideally, I’d be able to unfold one entity at a time. So, in the top line between H and E, there would be 3 minimized boxes that I can expand, each at a time, when needed, as shown in the mockup.
What do you think?
