I’m a bit late to this one, but I can’t believe no-one else has commented!

Research in some form is absolutely vital to the success of most projects, but sadly in my experience it’s generally not done. The users of any application or site are unique in some way, and there’s no way to tease out the true behaviours and motivations of these users without some kind of research.

Sadly in a lot of organisations this is seen as unrealistic, but as you’ve said yourself, I think the problem is that clients aren’t yet sold on the benefits of UCD in many cases. These benefits need to be seen in terms of cold hard cash before a client wants to spend any money on it, and that isn’t surprising.

So I suppose in a nutshell we all need to really “sell” the benefits of what we do, on an individual client level, but also through blogs, events etc.