In our model, the cost and the benefit elements are considered as distinct from each other. To justify this modeling approach, consider the fact that different search engines or approaches to organizing information may lead to the same set of documents being retrieved (resulting in the same benefit to the user). However, one engine or information organization approach may be more user friendly and more efficient than the other, whereby the user will be able to perform the search faster and with greater ease. In other words, two different designs can lead to the same benefit (or cost) but different user costs (or benefits).
There is a potentially high cost to the user resulting from information search and interactions. For example, the user may invoke a WAIS-like search engine to look up information on a topic, and be presented with an overload of possibly irrelevant articles, which simply happen to contain keywords specified by the user. Similarly, meaningful interactions involving papers or projects over platforms such as Usenet groups or Internet Relay Chat (IRC) can be tedious for the inability to reference information dynamically, and the absence of a shared workspace like a Multicast Backbone (MBONE) Whiteboard. This is not necessarily a real dollar cost; rather, it is the opportunity cost associated with the time and effort put in by the user.
With the isolated technologies that exist on and off the Internet, it may be possible to provide a high level of information access and interaction richness (the benefit side); unfortunately, the time and effort (and hence cost) for the user may be prohibitively high. The users' cost increases with poor information organization, less efficient search engines, lack of multimedia support, the inability to interact in asynchronous or synchronous manner, and with poor management of the interaction processes. We argue that by combining features and capabilities in a coordinated fashion within a single system we identify as the Collaboratory, we can simultaneously increase the level of information access and interaction richness while reducing the users' cost. In the subsection below, we address this issue of choosing appropriate combinations of design factors.