Keep the Pain and Test the Diagnosis in Each Complaint
The Complaint-to-Hypothesis Converter
Companion to You Are Not the User · Updated 2026-09-29
Use this when a complaint or a feature request arrives with a diagnosis attached, and you want to keep the pain and test the diagnosis. Worked in “Watch Users Work to Find What Causes Their Complaints.”
The Complaint-to-Hypothesis Converter, one complaint per row.
| The complaint, verbatim | The pain it proves (what hurts, for whom, how often) | At least three candidate causes | Evidence that would distinguish them | The smallest test |
|---|---|---|---|---|
A complaint proves pain; it doesn’t diagnose cause. If the third column holds only the cause the complainer named, the row isn’t finished. The Observation-to-Hypothesis Prompt in Appendix B does a first pass on a pile of these.