We do. We have real customers do real surveys of our real web sites. In person. We even do shadowing to see how real people use our sites in their daily work.

It's uncommon in SV due to laziness and an unwillingness to talk to actual human beings. Which is dumb because there are companies that will handle this for you.

But SV is stuck in this mindset that everything can be solved by an algorithm. It can't. The tech echo chamber really needs to get over itself.