Leveraging Mental Models for Human-Centered Explanations: A Systematic Design Approach Illustrated by Explainable Fake Review Identification

Explainable AI (XAI) often prioritizes model fidelity over user intelligibility, yielding explanations that satisfy technical transparency yet fail to support human sense-making. We propose a human-centered approach, MIND-X (Mental-model INtegrated Design for eXplainability), which aligns explanations with users’ mental models, commonsense concepts, and judgment heuristics. Using fake review detection as a case study, we contribute: (1) a qualitative study (n=10) that elicits how people assess review credibility and produces an actionable, design-guiding taxonomy of perceptual cues; (2) a set of design principles that link those cues to explanation strategies and prompt LLMs to generate adaptive, language-based explanations; and (3) a quantitative evaluation (n=166) showing that these explanations offer distinct advantages over token-level transparency methods widely used in explainable text classification in terms of understandability, satisfaction, perceived trust, persuasiveness, and decision-making support. Rather than claiming general superiority, our evaluation illustrates how grounding explanations in users’ everyday reasoning practices can produce more intelligible and context-sensitive accounts. Our findings advance human-centered explanation design beyond a mere “gloss of transparency,” demonstrating that a mental-model-aligned design process can improve intelligibility and support accountability across user-centered explanation tasks.