Relentlessly focus on your customers: test usability.
gazehawk.com
gazehawk.com
There are two known ways to make good products.
One is to hire a large team of excellent designers and design managers, relentlessly design multiple alternatives for every single option, and have many layers of design review all the way to the executive level. Continuously kill off all ideas that are not perfect, and all features that you don't have time to do perfectly. Have your designers and executives use the products realistically for long periods of time before release to identify problem areas. If you are willing to do this, feel free to not do usability testing.
On the other hand, if you have to get to market quickly, if some of your features are sometimes half thought-through, if your design department is so backlogged you're lucky to get even one thoughtful comp for the current engineering work, you had damn well better do usability testing.
These are the two choices. You should not expect to design everything once, build it once, not do user testing, and then blame your crappy product on the meme that "Apple doesn't do user testing."
I couldn't have said it better myself. I thought about talking about Apple in the blog post, but ultimately decided that it was a bit too complicated and a bit too distracting to address in the post.
But my views align with yours: Apple is not the default result of a company that de-emphasizes usability testing.
Has that ever been substantiated? I've heard it once or twice in various incarnations, such as "Apple doesn't do Market Research" or something of the like. I really don't think it's reasonable to say that. Apple may not do end user testing,but I'm sure they do usability testing. It may be a trivial distinction to some, but I think it's sort of important.