Explanations in Everyday Software Systems

The integration of explanations within software can address the opacity of complex systems, making them more understandable to end-users. Understanding what type of system requires what types of explanations is necessary to facilitate the consideration of explainability in early software design processes. In order to specify explainability requirements, an explainability taxonomy that applies to different software types is needed. Our work reports on the results of an online survey with 84 participants. We asked the participants to state their questions and confusions concerning their three most recently used software systems and elicited explainability needs from their statements. These needs were coded by three researchers. In total, we identified and classified 315 explainability needs from the survey answers.