TY - GEN

T1 - Do Users’ Explainability Needs in Software Change with Mood?

AU - Obaidi, Martin

AU - Droste, Jakob

AU - Deters, Hannah

AU - Herrmann, Marc

AU - Klünder, Jil

AU - Schneider, Kurt

N1 - Publisher Copyright: © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2025.

PY - 2025/4/1

Y1 - 2025/4/1

N2 - 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.

AB - 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.

KW - explainability

KW - mood analysis

KW - software engineering

KW - survey study

KW - user experience

UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/record.url?scp=105002720582&partnerID=8YFLogxK

U2 - 10.1007/978-3-031-88531-0_5

DO - 10.1007/978-3-031-88531-0_5

M3 - Conference contribution

AN - SCOPUS:105002720582

SN - 9783031885303

T3 - Lecture Notes in Computer Science

SP - 56

EP - 71

BT - Requirements Engineering

A2 - Hess, Anne

A2 - Susi, Angelo

PB - Springer Science and Business Media Deutschland GmbH

T2 - 31st International Working Conference on Requirements Engineering

Y2 - 7 April 2025 through 10 April 2025

ER -