On the Design and Evaluation of Human-centered Explainable AI Systems: A Systematic Review and Taxonomy (2510.12201v1)

Abstract: As AI becomes more common in everyday living, there is an increasing demand for intelligent systems that are both performant and understandable. Explainable AI (XAI) systems aim to provide comprehensible explanations of decisions and predictions. At present, however, evaluation processes are rather technical and not sufficiently focused on the needs of human users. Consequently, evaluation studies involving human users can serve as a valuable guide for conducting user studies. This paper presents a comprehensive review of 65 user studies evaluating XAI systems across different domains and application contexts. As a guideline for XAI developers, we provide a holistic overview of the properties of XAI systems and evaluation metrics focused on human users (human-centered). We propose objectives for the human-centered design (design goals) of XAI systems. To incorporate users' specific characteristics, design goals are adapted to users with different levels of AI expertise (AI novices and data experts). In this regard, we provide an extension to existing XAI evaluation and design frameworks. The first part of our results includes the analysis of XAI system characteristics. An important finding is the distinction between the core system and the XAI explanation, which together form the whole system. Further results include the distinction of evaluation metrics into affection towards the system, cognition, usability, interpretability, and explanation metrics. Furthermore, the users, along with their specific characteristics and behavior, can be assessed. For AI novices, the relevant extended design goals include responsible use, acceptance, and usability. For data experts, the focus is performance-oriented and includes human-AI collaboration and system and user task performance.