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Comment by pm | Hacker News Reader

Absolutely.

95% of the suggestions product creators receive are solutions. A product creator's job is to work out what problem their customer is trying to solve. It goes to the same motivation as root cause analysis when analysing an outage: the actual problem is nestled deep under layers of semantic shielding.

Whether your product is trying to solve that problem is another question, but at least you can understand how others perceive and try to use your product, which goes a long way to getting a product to be more broadly adopted.

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> layers of semantic shielding.

I love this term. It describes perfectly something I encountered during my days as the sole technical support for a small ISP. I got really good at routing around it in my customers brains.

I would ask "have you installed anything?", they would say no.

I would ask "do you have any new programs or stuff?", they would say yes.

Because to them, installing something was like adding something under the hood of a car. Since putting in a new program didn't involve taking the cover off the computer, there wasn't anything "installed".

There was mismatch in our definitions of terms. I had to figure out how to route around it. I got really sensitive to things like that, and routing around it.

Semantic mismatch might be another term for it in my case.

semantic shielding is a word I have not heard before. But it perfectly summarizes most of the interactions with customers and stakeholders

Causal shielding feels like a better term in this case

I honestly made it up on the spot, so don't take it as proper nomenclature. However, to describe it another way: the unconscious mind synthesises its emotional choice, which the conscious mind presents as rational fact. If you want to know how the mind arrived at that conclusion, you've got to go on a fact-finding mission, i.e., asking why.

However, asking that question without triggering a negative response is an art form within itself. Rarely can you be so direct, which is why it's often much easier to watch how a person interacts with a product rather than asking them why they did what they did.

> the unconscious mind synthesises its emotional choice, which the conscious mind presents as rational fact. If you want to know how the mind arrived at that conclusion, you've got to go on a fact-finding mission, i.e., asking why.

the more common name for it is post-hoc rationalization.

Thanks for that, I'll add that to my vocabulary.

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