Users are a source for problems, not solutions, that's the designer's job. However, the most common way that users articulate problems is in the form of solutio

Users are a source for problems, not solutions, that's the designer's job. However, the most common way that users articulate problems is in the form of solutions. It's then the designer's job to reverse engineer what the problem is from the proposed solution and design a solution that both fixes the problem and is contextually appropriate to the rest of the product. So when you listen to users and they tell you "you should do X", just blindly doing X is a path to failure but similarly ignoring them is also a path to failure. There's an art to properly eliciting insight from users and it's a mix of observation, interrogation and thought. In general, the best advice I've found is focus on the emotional and not the logical. When you ask when was the last time you had a problem with our product, you force the user to come up with ad-hoc logical arguments and paradigms that are most often wrong. If you ask when was the last time you were frustrated or annoyed with our product, you hone in much more reliably on real sticking points.