Do Users' Explainability Needs in Software Change with Mood?

TL;DR

This study investigates how users' mood and demographics influence their explainability needs in software, finding that these factors have limited but specific effects, highlighting the importance of personalized explanation systems.

Contribution

It provides empirical evidence that explainability needs are highly subjective and only partially influenced by objective user traits, urging personalized approaches.

Findings

Emotional reactivity correlates with UI explanation needs.

Age negatively correlates with explanation needs.

Limited relationship between demographics and explanation preferences.

Abstract

Context and Motivation: The increasing complexity of modern software systems often challenges users' abilities to interact with them. Taking established quality attributes such as usability and transparency into account can mitigate this problem, but often do not suffice to completely solve it. Recently, explainability has emerged as essential non-functional requirement to help overcome the aforementioned difficulties. Question/problem: User preferences regarding the integration of explanations in software differ. Neither too few nor too many explanations are helpful. In this paper, we investigate the influence of a user's subjective mood and objective demographic aspects on explanation needs by means of frequency and type of explanation. Principal ideas/results: Our results reveal a limited relationship between these factors and explanation needs. Two significant correlations were identified: Emotional reactivity was positively correlated with the need for UI explanations, while a negative correlation was found between age and user interface needs. Contribution: As we only find very few significant aspects that influence the need for explanations, we conclude that the need for explanations is very subjective and does only partially depend on objective factors. These findings emphasize the necessity for software companies to actively gather user-specific explainability requirements to address diverse and context-dependent user demands. Nevertheless, future research should explore additional personal traits and cross-cultural factors to inform the development of adaptive, user-centered explanation systems.