Rocket Surgery

I'm reading "Rocket Surgery Made Easy: The Do-It-Yourself Guide to Finding and Fixing Usability Problems" right now. I really like Steve Krug's authorial style.

He suggests that:
Even though terms like “user-centered design” and “user experience” are now in the vocabulary of most people working on Web sites, relatively few designers, developers, stakeholders, managers, and check-signers—who all have a hand in the design process—have actually spent any time watching how people use Web sites. As a result, we end up designing for our abstract idea of users, based for the most part on ourselves.
It is interesting to note, though, that when you do spend some time and resources on exploring how users interact with your design you can have a tremendous amount of success. Jakob Nielson, who has been doing UX design and testing for many years, says that:
According to our survey, spending 10% of your development budget on usability should improve your conversion rate by 83%.  
Nielson is generally a pretty skeptical guy when it comes to quantitative results, but there's not much that can be said about this number -- it is based on the actual ROI of redesigns of websites based on how much of their budget was put into user experience design and testing. Doubling your conversion rate for a website is a pretty big deal for a business.

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