Reddit mentions of Rocket Surgery Made Easy: The Do-It-Yourself Guide to Finding and Fixing Usability Problems

Depends on what you want to do — UX is a pretty broad field. I'm a user interface designer with a UX background, which means I've designed sites, web apps and mobile apps, but there's plenty of UX positions that don't require any sort of visual design or front-end development experience.

For example, there are labs that conduct user research and interviews, run focus groups, or do user testing. Hell, you could even apply to be a user tester at a site like usertesting.com. Not sure how much money you can make from that, but it's something.

Also, there are UX positions that go from beginning research and discovery for projects up through the wireframing, which doesn't require any visual design experience. You'll usually hand off your UX work to a designer or a developer to implement.

Some good books to read about UX are:

• Don't Make Me Think by Steve Krug
  
• Rocket Surgery Made Easy by Steve Krug
  
• About Face 3 by a couple people
  
• The Design of Everyday Things by Donald Norman
  
• The Inmates Are Running the Asylum by Alan Cooper
  
• The Elements of User Experience by Jesse James Garrett
  
  There's also plenty of online resources about UX. Smashing Magazine has a ton of articles on it.
  
  If you are good at puzzles, love solving complex problems, and contain any shred of empathy, user experience could be a good field for you.

FYI, while awesome, this idea is not original

I can help you with that!

Rocket surgery.

and me this

http://www.amazon.com/Rocket-Surgery-Made-Easy-Yourself/dp/0321657292

I think you may need to read this.

I'd be glad to. To start, here are some terms to look for:

1. IxD / Interaction Design
   
2. UX / User Experience Design
   
3. HCI / Human-Computer Interaction
   
4. Goal-Directed Design
   
   "The Crystal Goblet" explains the aim of print design, which is a good precurser to reading about interactive design media.
   
   As far as books go, I strongly recommend About Face 3: The Essentials of Interaction Design. It's a fairly long book, but it's worth reading to build a strong foundation of understanding in IxD.
   
   A lot of IxD is about effectively using visual design to achieve goals. If you want to understand the visual tools of IxD after finding the theory interesting, you might read the mistitled Layout Workbook (or any other overview book; it's not actually a book about layouts — nor a workbook), followed by Bringhurst for advanced traditional typography.
   
   Rocket Surgery Made Easy and other Steve Krug books are commonly suggested for more IxD topics, but I haven't gotten around to reading them. It's likely they're lighter reading than About Face 3.

A good book about streamlined usability testing is "Rocket Surgery Made Easy" by Steve Krug:

https://www.amazon.com/Rocket-Surgery-Made-Easy-Yourself/dp/0321657292

Some thoughts about user testing from Jakob Nielsen:

https://www.nngroup.com/articles/why-you-only-need-to-test-with-5-users/

If you can find 2 laptops and 2 rooms you can do user testing.

Find some internal people as your participants (since you don't have a budget it's better to find people that don't bill their hours in your project). Ideally you would like to have people corresponding to your real user personas but it's still better than nothing.

So you're having the computer that will be used by test participants. You can use a free tool like join.me to broadcast sound and screen to the other laptop in another room. You need 1 person to help the participants in the test room. You should be in the observation room (any other room).

Ideally you also record what's happening on the screen of the participant (Camtasia can be useful but you can simply use Quicktime if you're on a Mac).

In one day, you can interview 5 to 7 person (1 hr sessions) and you'll get great insights about potential usability issues.

If possible, have one of the stakeholder spend some time in the observation room so they can experience the value of user testing.

This book is a really good guide on doing user testing on a small budget: https://www.amazon.com/Rocket-Surgery-Made-Easy-Yourself/dp/0321657292

I would be tempted to run a user testing session (with boss present) and go through three users asking them to do critical tasks on the site and see what works. I'd guess that you are right, but if your boss happens to be right - better to know and adjust than to spend that time arguing over who is right.

If you are interested in this style of testing checkout Steve Krug's book Rocket Surgery Made Easy: The Do-It-Yourself Guide to Finding and Fixing Usability Problems

I don't know exactly, but this book will make it easy for you... http://www.amazon.com/gp/aw/d/0321657292/ref=redir_mdp_mobile/175-1138342-1236566

See also: Rocket Surgery Made Easy.

I would actually recommend Don't Make Me Think, Revisited and maybe Rocket Surgery Made Easy, both by Steve Krug.

The first book is a fantastic introduction to the core mindset you need to have when approaching interactive user design (like that you find with websites and mobile interfaces). It's also an easy read - you can easily digest it within a day.

Read the first book and if you find yourself having more questions about the actual execution of usability testing, pick up the second one.

It's even a book!

This one?

This is completely unrelated to PHP. What is this post doing here?

• Don't Make Me Think by Steve Krug.
  
  
• Rocket Surgery Made Easy by Steve Krug.
  
  
• About Face 3 by Alan Cooper.