Jared Spool posts an interesting set of conclusions about how design teams work.

At Viget, we tend to focus on the latter three: genius design, activity-focused design, and user-focused design. Of course, unintended design probably happens in all projects to one extent or another. How those three types fit into the projects really depends on the needs, timeline, and budget of the project.

On my own, I hope most of it falls into the genius and activity-focused categories. I don’t really do user research to any real extent for personal projects, except for informal bits here or there, and it’s certainly all low/no-budget.