The progressive research and development in computing and information processing technologies have stimulated 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 malleability. Coupled with the a±liation with metadata and additional layers of e-contents, e-documents are engaging a new paradigm of users who are actively seeking, selecting and constructing information more than they are ‘receiving’ information contained within e-documents and collections of such documents. This paper reports on the pertinent findings of a research that intentionally took an immense leap in the design and empirical evaluation of an information environment for a new generation of e-documents that is endowed with a set of innovative interactions and electronic enhancements. Apart from presenting a list of essential features of future edocuments that will serve as useful design guidelines, the research advocates that the way forward is 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 tasks they will likely seek to accomplish. Future work on designing e-documents should thus focus on designing for media complementarity, and aim to further develop and incorporate tools and features that are most helpful to the user community.