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

With 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 members of an organization can make better sense out of the information available. In this study, we develop a task-representation fit model to generate several predictions about the potential of multimedia to alleviate the limitations of text-based information in the context of individual decision makers utilizing organizational data and test them in a laboratory experiment. Results support the task-representation fit relationships predicted. For analyzable tasks, text-based representation and multimedia representation are equally effective in reducing perceived equivocality levels. For less-analyzable tasks, only multimedia representation was instrumental in reducing perceived equivocality levels.