We have already discussed how the design factors are individually beneficial for both the benefit and the cost sides in the value equation. Now we provide examples to show how the above features become much more valuable to the users when they are provided in an integrated manner.
The ability to dynamically link to an information resource to support one's stand on an issue or a proposed model is a key feature of a constructive and scholarly interaction. For example, in a discussion involving the business value of IT, someone taking a position that measurement problems have led to the ``IT productivity paradox'' could create a link to one or more relevant articles within his/her comments. While the Web allows hypertext links, it does not come with a platform for asynchronous or synchronous communication. Herein lies the complementarity for the benefit side. The benefit of having the platform and the linking capability together is higher than the sum of values derived from having two systems, one with the linking capability and the other with the forum.
As a second example of benefit side complementarity between pairs of design factors, a Collaboratory that supports multimedia but does not have an interactive feature (e.g., asynchronous or synchronous communication) or vice versa will be less valuable to a user than one which supports both. Consider a traditional Web page, which has multi-media capabilities, but which does not support interactions like newsgroups. On the other hand, newsgroups lack the multi-media capabilities of Web based applications. The benefit of having both features together is very high from the users' standpoint.
In a similar vein, we could take pairwise combinations of various design factors and establish that the value of having them together is higher than the sum of values derived from having them in isolation. Such pairwise comparisons establish the complementarity between all the design related factors.
To understand the cost side complementarity, we note that theoretically it is possible to have all or most of the above features on The Internet in an isolated manner. For example, Web and Gopher sites already have a large volume of relevant information on virtually every topic. The Web also supports multimedia documents. USENET bulletin boards allow asynchronous interactions on a global basis. Internet Relay Chat provides synchronous interaction capabilities. WAIS, Archie, and their derivative search applications allow users to search for documents and their locations. However, from a user's perspective, it is tedious to use one application to locate a document, to open another application to post a comment. In other words, the cost of time and effort will be too high to use separate applications for each aspect of an interaction. On the other hand, having all these capabilities within one system can significantly reduce the users' cost of spending time on a Collaboratory. To be more specific, take the case of information organization and search capabilities. Having better information organization and search capabilities together will reduce the user's opportunity cost much more than either of these alone. Similarly, being able to dynamically link to, say, FTP sites, but not retrieve diagrams or pictures associated with a document will be much more tedious (and hence costly) than using a system which allows both dynamic links and multi-media documents. As with the benefit side, we can continue this pairwise comparison to argue that when all the capabilities are present simultaneously, the cost to the user is the lowest.
In the above examples of benefit side complementarity, we focused on how various combinations of design choices improved information access and interaction richness (and hence benefited the user). However, there is complementarity between the level of information access and interaction richness as well. A Collaboratory which only disseminates information in an organized way or only supports interactions will be less valuable than one which provides both capabilities. Thus we find complementarity at each level in the value model shown in Figure 1.
It should be noted that while choosing the design factors in a
coordinated fashion in the right directions will increase the net
benefit to a user, it is not feasible (due to technological and
resource constraints) for the designers and developers of a
Collaboratory to provide the highest possible levels of these
factors. Although we do not provide a mathematical formulation of the
Collaboratory designer/developer's choice problem, s/he must consider
the tradeoff between the development cost and the users' net
value
.