Doing a proper, unbiased usability study is difficult. I only worked at once company that had a dedicated user research team. The rest the time we designers had to run remote usability tests ourselves, for our own work, which is of course a pretty poor way to get any kind of objective result. No one wants to say, "hey, I tested my design and it sucked hard. Can I have another four weeks to try again?" Furthermore, we often didn't really have much of a say in the fundamentals of the visual appearance, we had to follow the brand standards and GUI pattern library that was chosen by other people. The brand guidelines were often delivered from on high from an outside consultancy, while the GUI pattern library was often produced in-house and robustly tested, but never perfect.