State Treemap: an awareness widget for multi-synchronous groupware

Awareness widgets facilitate coordination for both synchronous and asynchronous groupware systems. Unfortunately, they cannot be used for multi-synchronous groupware systems, where people work simultaneously but disconnected on the same project. With a group of architects, we have designed a new awareness widget for multi-synchronous groupware system called "State Treemap". This widget shows the divergence states of shared objects using Shneiderman's treemap visualization (1992). We have developed and integrated this widget in a platform for hosting virtual teams of architects. We describe the motivations, the design and the realization of this original widget.