Understanding and Testing Responsive Web Design
Responsive web design has become a key factor in how we access information across a variety of digital devices. Things that seemed impossible a few years ago have become commonplace. I still remember what my work on school projects was like in 2005, when not only computers became available, but also a telephone connection to the Internet.
However, the Internet will never be the same again. The explosive growth in the amount of information has also changed the way it is displayed. Responsive web design has allowed us to browse different websites with the swipe of a finger. Gone are the days when we had to zoom in and out on our phone screen to view certain websites. Now, thanks to responsive web design, we can seamlessly view various pages on our phones without any problems. This was made possible by testing responsive web design, which is constantly given priority. Let’s understand what is responsive web design?
What is Responsive Web Design?
Responsive web design is a concept that allows you to view websites seamlessly on different devices, regardless of their resolution. To understand the concept of responsive web design, we need to understand a few key elements associated with it. Each web page contains various elements such as images, text, or menus. And depending on how these elements are placed in the website layout, we may set limits for scaling these elements to display according to the screen resolution of the device.
Fundamentals of Responsive Web Design
The fundamental idea behind creating responsive websites is to increase or decrease the layout or viewport to fit the screen size of the device. Setting the responsive website to match the screen resolution will also make it easier to test responsive websites. The viewing area is the area of a web page that is viewed on the screen, it does not include browser toolbars, tab design, etc., it simply includes the site content that is currently being viewed on the screen.
Let’s look a little deeper to understand what elements make a web design responsive.
Text. We know that all websites have text that needs to be scaled to fit the screen. Changing the text size for different screen resolutions while maintaining aspect ratio will surely provide a consistent user experience when browsing the website from different devices. For example, the text size of a heading and a paragraph on a computer screen and a phone screen cannot be the same. However, reducing the text size and keeping the same ratio will certainly help keep the content display consistent.
Media. Web pages should contain not only text, but also images or videos to keep readers interested. Both video and static images have different parameters that most designers tend to keep. For video, as a rule, keep the aspect ratio unchanged, take into account the orientation of the screen and set the appropriate settings. However, when it comes to images, in most cases they are optimized for easy viewing on small screens. And in case a particular image is too long or too wide, designers usually keep the focus of the image intact and omit the rest, as shown in the image below.
You can also optimize the image for easy viewing on various devices.
Menu. Website menus and tabs are common elements that are used in the development of most websites. While long horizontal menus are easy to view on desktop or laptop browsers, viewing them on mobile devices can be problematic. Responsive web design solves this problem by providing collapsible menu styles for easy browsing and navigating between web pages.
Web design layout. The website is mainly planned with layout design in mind. Web design layouts come in handy when you want to plan how your content will look on different devices and screen resolutions. Having separate grids in the layout will help move them around when you want to optimize it for smaller screens. It also makes it easier to test a responsive website with various web testing tools.
Responsive web design testing
Now that we have a clear understanding of how a responsive website works, it’s time to learn how we can perform responsive web design testing to ensure high quality standards.
What do we need to test?
Responsive design testing on different devices should cover every element and component of the website. Finding a reliable responsive web design testing tool will also help you easily test different components. Responsive design testing includes components such as text, image optimization, visual validation, etc. All of these play a critical role in delivering a consistent user experience.
Content style and alignment. We need to make sure the content is properly aligned and displayed consistently. It is necessary to control the text size ratio so that the style and alignment are the same on all devices.
Media Consistency – Make sure the images are clearly visible and provide the necessary context on all devices. Videos and images must be consistently optimized for appropriate device sizes. Ensure that images or videos do not overlap with each other or text to ensure clear communication and a clean visual experience.
Menu. Make sure the menu can be expanded and collapsed on smaller screens so that users can easily navigate the website. Some devices have a compatibility issue that causes buttons and text to be misaligned, resulting in poor visual experience. Testing on real devices and running tests in browsers with different configurations will help us solve these problems.
Mobile device orientation. Since mobile devices and tablets rotate easily, we need to make sure that the web design is optimized for orientation and that page content is rendered appropriately. Not being able to view a certain website or web application in different orientations is a big frustrating and creates a negative user experience.
How to test?
Responsive web design requires websites to be tested across different browsers and devices. Cross browser compatibility testing ensures that we test the website on multiple browsers with different system configurations and screen resolutions. Responsive web design testing includes testing on mobile devices to make sure websites look and work the same as they do on desktop and laptop browsers. Selenium is an efficient automation tool that we can use to automate some cross-browser compatibility tests. However, we will need to use other tools such as Applitools for visual testing, Galen for checking size changes on a responsive website. Galen works well in Selenium Grid and can be used to set up test cases to run cloud testing tools like pCloudy to ensure responsive web design testing is done on real mobile devices and browsers. Because Galen can be used to run tests in parallel, test teams can save time, speed up the testing process, and get results faster.
Conclusion
Website scaling on devices with different resolutions and screen sizes is made possible by responsive web design. However, testing these responsive websites is challenging as you will still need to test them on different devices and screen sizes to ensure quality and compatibility. Responsive website testing automation is becoming a key element for delivering quality responsive websites that perform well on a variety of devices. Happy testing!
