Is eye tracking out of reach for web and RIA developers? I think for the most part today cost and lack of knowledge are the two biggest barriers for your average web developer when considering usability testing via eye tracking.

Cost is the easiest factor to examine. Eye trackers are generally in the $30,000 USD range, this of course to buy the whole set up. Alternatively, you could hire a company that already has the equipment, and specialized in using and providing you a report. This is probably quicker but still not cheap.

Of course you could go DIY and set up your own low cost eye tracker, but seems like it would be even harder. There are other solutions like Scrutinizer which simulates your foveal vision, CrazyEgg which gives heatmaps of clicks on a site or RobotReplay which can replay an entire user session as if you were watching over their shoulder.

Lack of knowledge is a bit fuzzier as it falls into two major categories: 1) lack of expertise in using an eye tracker and 2) lack of understanding of the benefits.

Eye tracking equipment is quite sophisticated and can be finicky to set up. Furthermore, once a user is instrumented you still have to know how to conduct a proper usability test. Even once you have the test results back you may not know what to do with them or how interpret them.

According to a post on why AdaptivePath doesn’t use eye tracking:

“First, lack of availability of it and familiarity with it as a research tool.
Second, I find it difficult to interpret the data”

One of the factors with lack of understanding the benefits may also be a result of designers who are a little over confident in their own abilities. In the AdaptivePath post one person states that any good designer should be able to figure where a users eyes will be drawn.

“I think a good information designer could have devised the flow of the eye on the UI on their own.”

Based on my understanding of vision and the brain, which is limited, that seems unlikely. Sune one of the commenters echoes this with:

“Information designers are NOT able to anticipate eye movements, not even for very simple stimulus. As part of my thesis some years ago I did an experiment, where this was evident. Experienced web designers were asked to predict the typical gaze path, and this was compared against the actual eye movement pattern. There were no correlation.”

Still this coming from AdaptivePath one of the leading web UX and design companies today, they even coined the term Ajax!

I haven’t been involved in any eye tracking studies myself but I will be working with usability expert and eye tracking researcher from Simon Fraser University this summer to determine the correlation between eye tracking, usability and some of the low cost web tools available today. So I’ll keep this thread going.

Let’s figure this out and push back on guys like Jakob Nielsen who are slamming RIAs and Web 2.0 because of a few early examples that didn’t make the cut in terms of usability.

What process or tools do you use for usability testing?