What is the focus of XAI in UI design? Prioritizing UI design principles for enhancing XAI user experience

TL;DR

This work addresses the lack of prioritized UI design guidance for Explainable AI (XAI) when the user is a non-expert. It adopts a Human-Centered XAI (HCXAI) framework to define five XAI user-experience indicators and four UI design principles (Natureness, Responsiveness, Flexibility, Sensitivity), then evaluates four corresponding prototypes using Analytic Hierarchy Process (AHP) with 19 participants, complemented by post-study interviews. Key findings show that the most critical UX standards are Trust (0.2903) and Understandability (0.2398), while Sensitivity (0.3296) and Flexibility (0.3014) are the top XUI principles, highlighting the need for context-aware, user-centric explanations. The results provide practical guidance for allocating XUI design space and advance HCXAI research by offering a lightweight, non-expert-focused UX standard framework. As XAI adoption grows, these insights help practitioners tailor explanations to individual and scenario-specific needs, improving user trust and decision quality.

Abstract

With the widespread application of artificial intelligence(AI), the explainable AI (XAI) field has undergone a notable resurgence. In this background, the importance of user experience in XAI has become increasingly prominent. Simultaneously, the user interface (UI) serves as a crucial link between XAI and users. However, despite the existence of UI design principles for XAI, there is a lack of prioritization based on their significance. This will lead practitioners to have a vague understanding of different design principles, making it difficult to allocate design space reasonably and emphasize design focal points. This paper aims to prioritize four design principles, providing clear guidance for UI design in XAI. Initially, we conducted a lightweight summary to derive five user experience standards for non-expert users in XAI. Subsequently, we developed four corresponding webpage prototypes for the four design principles. Nineteen participants then interacted with these prototypes, providing ratings based on five user experience standards, and We calculated the weights of the design principles. Our findings indicate that, for non-expert users, "sensitivity" is the optimal UI design principle (weight = 0.3296), followed by "flexibility" (weight = 0.3014). Finally, we engage in further discussion and summarization of our research results, and present future works and limitations.

Figures (5)

• Figure 1: The XUI of Natureness.
• Figure 2: The XUI of Responsiveness.
• Figure 3: The XUI of Flexibility.
• Figure 4: The XUI of Sensitivity.
• Figure 5: The AHP model