Benefits of spider diagrams
Spider diagrams are a natural complement to tree-structure sitemaps. Whilst they do perhaps take a little getting used to, they do offer a different kind of visualisation.
- At-a-glance - spider diagrams can more easily provide an overview of a site structure, whilst losing none of the detail of lower levels
- Non-hierarchical - websites are not hierarchical things. Certainly, users typically do not transition through them in strictly hierarchical ways (unless they are being guided or forced down purchase funnel or other linear, step-wise process, e.g. an online purchase). So a non-hierarchical way of representing site structures can often inject a much-needed dose of realism into site design.
Related information
A spider diagram is a term from formal logic, and specifically from the study of Euler diagrams. Formally, a Spider Diagram adds existential points to an Euler diagram. The points indicate the existence of an attribute described by the intersection of contours in the Euler diagram.
Yeah, right :)
Alternative methods
Hierarchical tree-structure dendrograms are the only real diagrammatic alternative to spider diagrams. Though it would be possible to represent hierarchy via other kinds of graph - i.e. node and link - diagrams, e.g. entity-relation diagrams; semantic networks and so on.
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