I'd love to hear some unexpected insights you got from asking users.There are too many to list here. Things that the sort of people who read HN would never imagine.
One is that a surprising number of users don't know to press the "Search" button after they enter text into a search field. They will just sit there for a bit and when nothing happens, they assume it's broken.
I haven't followed up on this yet, but I suspect it's because people have gotten so used to autocomplete.