Comment Duh! (Score 1) 97
Try asking a 14 year old kid for directions and you'd have an answer to your research study.
Oh, and because our UI guys never *use* the site, I end up able to design a better UI than they do
That couldn't be more true. If you aren't developing the functionality of a UI, just the design, you can't possible develop anything good. Once you get into how a control will function, you can understand how a user might react to it intuitively in relation to the rest of the UI.
Thus spake the master programmer: "After three days without programming, life becomes meaningless." -- Geoffrey James, "The Tao of Programming"