Electronic Documents: What Lies Ahead?

The progressive research and development in computing and information processing technologies have fuelled its way to the emergence of a new range of electronic documents that are expected to fully exploit the electronic medium’s basic properties of added interactivity and flexibility. Coupled with the affiliation with metadata and additional layers of information, e-documents will engage a new paradigm of active users who will be increasingly seeking, selecting and constructing information more than they are ‘receiving’ information contained within digitised equivalents of print documents. This paper reports on the pertinent findings on a research that intentionally took an immense leap in the design and empirical evaluation of an information environment for a newer-generation of e-documents (e-journals in particular) that is endowed with a set of enhanced interactions and features. The aim is to investigate how various state-of-theart and emerging tools and features can be integrated into one single user interface environment to satisfy end users’ varying needs in interacting with electronic information. Apart from being able to draw out a host of essential features of future e-documents that will serve as useful design guidelines, the study advocates that the way forward is perhaps not to promote e-documents either as replacements or as alternatives to their print counterparts, but rather to continually strive to focus on the needs of users and on the task they will likely seek to accomplish. Future work on designing e-documents should thus aim to further develop and incorporate tools and features that are most helpful to the user community.