Where I work we do a small amount of user testing to validate our design choices. We recently just planned out a release worth of work to improve user experience because we missed the mark with our design.
If we didn't do this we'd lose to the competition.
When I worked at EA we regularly performed user validation, we had a whole room set up for proctored user testing. Hired professionals to conduct the testing. We also invested a heap into A/B testing and had a whole team dedicated to tracking this and analytics in general. This was just for marketing/launch web sites.
I've been working in the industry for 20 years and while the norm is as you describe there are certainly plenty of exceptions, especially when you product lives and dies by UX.
If we didn't do this we'd lose to the competition.
When I worked at EA we regularly performed user validation, we had a whole room set up for proctored user testing. Hired professionals to conduct the testing. We also invested a heap into A/B testing and had a whole team dedicated to tracking this and analytics in general. This was just for marketing/launch web sites.
I've been working in the industry for 20 years and while the norm is as you describe there are certainly plenty of exceptions, especially when you product lives and dies by UX.