If you are a Shopify/Commerce Developer, or if you’re building a product with pain-driven design, you need to know about the XY Problem.
The XY Problem is when you focus too much on the attempted solution, rather than the actual problem - which wasted enormous amounts of time and energy for both solution providers and users asking for a solution.
It goes like this:
User wants to do X.
User doesn't know how to do X, but thinks they can fumble their way to a solution if they can just manage to do Y.
User doesn't know how to do Y either.
User asks for help with Y.
Others try to help user with Y, but are confused because Y seems like a strange problem to want to solve.
After much interaction and wasted time, it finally becomes clear that the user really wants help with X, and that Y wasn't even a suitable solution for X.
The problem occurs when people get stuck on what they believe is the solution and are unable to step back and explain the issue in full.
So what you can do about it? What is the solution to this problem?
Use Abstraction Ladder.
Abstraction Ladder is an exercise from S. I. Hayakawa’s 1939 book “Language in Thoughts and Action. It aims to help you draw out the hows and the whys of a problem, and analyze each step along the way. You start with a problem statement - this will be the center rung of your ladder.
As you move up each rung of the ladder, you drill into the broader, more abstract aspects of the problem. As you move down the ladder, you look into the problems’ more concrete attributes. You can create a 02-way ladder, one for Problem Discovery, by keep asking Why, and one for Solution Ideation - by keep asking How.
Here’s an example (credit goes to https://spin.atomicobject.com/)
Notice how the farther away from the problem statement, the more specific the items become - this is how you catch the concrete problems and solutions to said problems.
So here’s a TL, DR: What users tell you might not be their pain point, might just be an attempted solution (XY problem). To discover true pain and a specific solution, use the Ladder of Abstraction.