The Effect of Multimedia on Perceived Equivocality and Perceived Usefulness of Information Systems

V\/ith the advent of multimedia and intranet technologies, managers and information systems designers face a new challenge: how to capture and present information using a variety of representation formats (text, graphics, audio, video, and animations) so that merDbers of an organization can make better sense out of the information avaitable. In this study, we develop a task-representation fit model to generate several predictions ^Sirkka Jarvenpaa was the accepting senior editor for this paper. Introduction The growth of the Internet has changed not only the way individuals communicate in their daily lives, but also how members of an organization share and make sense out of information. For many years, larger organizations, such as Xerox, have recognized the value of storing their organizational information in multimedia format (Sprague 1995), Recently, with the advent of intranet technology, it has become more feasible for those in medium to smaller size organizations to share information in multimedia formats as well. This introduces a new challenge for managers MIS Quarterly Vol. 24 No. 3. pp. 449-471/September 2000 449 Lim & Benbasat/Effect of Multimedia and information systems designers: how to capture and present information using a variety of formats {text, graphics, audio, video, and animations) so that members of an organization can make better sense out of the information available. This paper examines whether or not a rich representation, such as multimedia, when used as a means to convey information can better support the information processing needs of decision makers compared to a less rich representation, such as text, and in what contexts and under what conditions such benefits are expected to accrue. The Cognitive and Technology Group at Vanderbilt (1993 , p. 118) defines multimedia as "linkage of text, sound, video, graphics, and the computer in such a way that the user's access to these media becomes nonlinear and virtually instantaneous."^ Multimedia availability has increased significantly in recent years; for example, the personal computers currently on the market are all multimedia-capable. The Internet is filled with web pages that contain graphics, animations, sound, and video. Multimedia-related books and magazines occupy significant amounts of the shelf space in the computer section of bookstores. In the organizational literature, several researchers have suggested using multimedia to store organizational information (Rao and GoldmanSegall 1995; Sprague 1995; Stein and Zwass 1995). The trends in both the popular and academic press give the impression that multimedia provides many additional benefits beyond that of text. Despite this perception, there have been no studies that systematically examined the benefits of multimedia over text in storing organizational information. Further, developers often concentrate on the "slickness" of multimedia and risk distracting users from the original information to be conveyed. Most importantly, because multimedia production is still costly and time consuming, it is important to examine if and under what conditions multimedia is effective. In this paper, we describe a study that was conducted to investigate the influence of media (text vs. multimedia) and task type (anaiyzable vs. lessanalyzable) on the perceived equivocality level of the information and the perception of the usefulness of the information system provided. According to Daft and Lengel (1986, p. 556), "Equivocality means ambiguity, the existence of multiple and (potentially) conflicting interpretations about an organizational situation" [emphasis added]. They argue that a major reason organizations process information is to reduce equivocality. This paper is organized as follows: A theoretical framework that describes the conditions under which multimedia can reduce the perceived equivocality of organizational information is developed in the next section. The third section describes the research method and the experiment conducted. Statistical analyses and the results are reported in the fourth section. The findings are then discussed. The paper concludes with a discussion of the implications of the findings.