The bad news is that most sites employ horribly misguided methodologies that do not assess real usability. Studying Opinion Instead of Use Traditional market research methods don't work for the Web. The basic problem is that one cannot ask users what they want and expect the answer to have any relation to their actual behavior when they go online.
Focus groups can often be directly misleading.
When people sit around a table and discuss what they might like to see on a site, they will often focus on superficial aspects and praise fancy features like animation and Flash effects. But if these same users were ever asked to actually use the site to accomplish a task, they would usually ignore the animations and would find that the Flash effects hurt them more than it helped them. Just as with focus groups, you get results three levels removed from the truth. I have even quoted this survey myself, even though I should know better than to quote the outcome of an opinion poll. The truth is that observations of actual, real-life user behavior show that people find the product they are looking for less than half of the time.