After the introduction of smartphones and mobile internet services, virtually everybody has been walking into walls, glued to their mobiles, reveling in the internet’s ethnographic information. This means it’s more important than ever to make sure your website works on mobile devices, but there’s a draw: the devices do you support? Tablet computers? What about phones? 

Responsive web design is the process of making a single website ‘respond’ to the size of the window it is displayed in, enabling users to view your website on any screen, large or tiny, and make it look as good as it does on a desktop computer. Responsive design has progressed steadily over the years, taking several forms as requirements and support for new technology have increased. The need to appeal to an increasingly mobile obsessed population has become more critical. This whitepaper examines the innovations that have arisen to address this issue, as well as where they are headed. How responsive design impacts a user’s background and how we can be more responsive to the customers’ requirements  is what responsive design is all about.

Guideline for Testing Responsive Web Design

We always want our websites to look nice on various devices, and this responsive web design testing guideline will assist you in accomplishing that goal. 

• Website Navigation Testing

The navigation bar should change in tandem with the device. A navigation bar is used to quickly navigate to separate segments or pages on your website. A navigation bar usually consists of five or more components. If we use @media queries with a meta tag to downscale the navigation bar on a mobile device, they will not be available or large enough just to click. As a result, on smaller screens, we go with a hamburger menu strategy, which is very common. It is so well-known that if a user can’t find something else, he would go out of his way to find it. 

It is important to test the navigation models on various screens as a guideline element to ensure that they are not promoting a poor user experience.

• Fonts Should Be Tested On Several Devices

Developers use a variety of fonts and design techniques to write text on their website to cater to users creatively. These fonts may or may not be strongly recognized, and in devices that rely on the encoding format, they may turn into odd numbers or codes. As a result, it’s important to test the fonts on a variety of devices before committing to real responsive testing.

The picture above depicts how the font-face approach is implemented in different browsers.

• Device-Browser Configurations Must Be Tested

Using Google Analytics to analyse web and mobile traffic, including the browsers and devices that were used to access the sites. You might want to use the trial versions to test the website’s responsive web design. This operation should be repeated every quarter with the addition of a new web browser and computer and the removal of the old ones.

• Small-Screen Device Testing

Mobile devices are used by more than 80% of Web users. You can’t have a website that doesn’t performed well to any mobile device because the number of mobile users is growing every day. As a result, considering the mobile-first design approach when designing for responsiveness becomes essential. Your design should first be optimized for small screens, such as cell phones, before moving on to bigger displays.

• Test Your Website’s Speed

The performance of your units in terms of sizing up or down as per devices is measured by responsive design. However, when it comes to heavy elements like photos, videos, and other media. They are the primary source of concern for affecting the website’s loading speed on smaller devices like smartphones which typically operate on lower frequencies. If we continue to make the same images on larger devices, such as laptops, the loading time will increase substantially, causing your end-users to become frustrated. 

According to a Forrester Consulting report, the minimum waiting period is just two seconds. The user will most likely hit the back key on the keyboard if your loader is still spinning after 2 seconds. As a result, test the speed of your website, and if it’s a little slower than you thought, use different methods to make the same images on these smaller devices.

• Test for Synchronization of Elements

For smaller screen devices, element synchronization is critical since they are easily identifiable. All can see when a shape is out of context and cutting through the limit. There are several elements on the website, and the tester must ensure that they are all aligned correctly on the computer. Responsive web design can yield no results unless it is rendered and aligned properly.

• Content Placement Test

Since the display area is wider on a larger screen, such as a desktop or laptop, it is much easier to locate an element. We may also concentrate on any corner due to the distance between the screen and the user. For mobile devices, however, this is not the case. On mobile devices, we must keep in mind that the screen size is restricted, and if we try to show everything as it is, the screen will become messy. Check to see whether the critical elements are inside this region or not and that the elements are not too crowded.

• Test for Faults With Cross-Browser Compatibility

The first and most important step in responsive design testing is to run cross-browser tests on the device to see whether the website is compatible with different browsers. Cross-browser testing enables you to access and discover your website on any browser, operating system, or specification. Cross-browser testing is a more complex concept, and discussing it here will take us away from the topic of this article. Manual cross-browser testing and automated cross-browser testing are two types of cross-browser testing that can be done in a variety of ways. 

Cloud-based online cross-browser testing tools are quite effective. Cloud-based tools are easier to use, less expensive, and do not require the establishment of any testing infrastructure. It is a personal choice, and if your methods produce the best results, that is equally well and good.

• Test The Ability To Interact

Mobile devices are available in a variety of screen sizes. Another factor to remember is that since Steve Jobs released the first iPhone, the interactive interface has evolved. Today, some people use a stylus for routine and precise contact, while others use only one hand to communicate with the computer. The main goal of this responsive website testing guideline is to ensure that the interactive experience remains consistent regardless of whether or how interactions occur. The key should not be so little that you can use your hand to press two at once. By multiple models and other means, the UI should attempt to embrace the majority of the options.

10. Test the Responsive Design of Your Website Popups.

Popups are widely used because they are an effective way to turn website visitors into paying customers and sales. Do you realize, however, that website pop-ups can be both a buddy and an opponent? It can irritate your visitors and significantly damage your website’s credibility with search engines if not displayed properly. 

You can use responsive design testing to evaluate that the pop-ups shown are responsive as well so that their function can be fulfilled on any device. 

A non-responsive popup can cause confusion for the user because the close button may fall outside of the limit, while a responsive popup would still entice the user to take advantage of the deal you’re displaying. Always remember to check this thing off your to-do list.

11. Test like a End User

The final item on our checklist is to test the website, not as a tester, but as an end-user going to visit this website. As a tester, you are always going to think like a tech expert, and you may lose some minor bugs because you believe they will not be noticed by the user. Actually, this is almost never the case. There is a good chance that at least 1% of the millions of people who visit your website will be troubled by that overlooked bug.

As the final task, always test your website as if you were a user. Investigate various areas of the website and become interested in the concept. If it’s an e-Commerce site, look through the items as if you’re wanting to purchase them. Add them to your shopping list and explore all of the website’s options before completing the purchase. You never know when or where your responsiveness will be required. You can think like an end-user and produce a bugless responsive website if you test like an end-user.

Responsive Design Testing Tools

To test your website’s actions across multiple devices, browsers, and operating systems, you must employ a thorough testing strategy. Taking into consideration all of the above-mentioned responsive web design testing guidelines items such as checking for manual intervention, page loading, fonts, images, navigations, and configurations. It would be a difficult challenge to bring out all of these activities manually.

There are a variety of tools on the market that can handle responsive website testing checklists with ease. These tools help to enable web developers to quickly design, build sensitive and high-performance web applications. Following are some of the widely used responsive web designing testing tools:

• Responsive Web Design Checker. Tests the responsiveness of tools that allow developers to select the device and resolution the website should respond to.
• Screenfly. This popular application is used to test web pages on a variety of screen sizes and devices.
• The Lambda Test. Over 22,000 browser, mobile, and OS combinations are tested with this cross-browser tool.
• Ghostlab. This tool examines a website across many browsers and mobile devices at the same time.
• Browser Stack. Browser Stack is one of the most extensive testing solutions on the market, with over 1,000 mobile and desktop browsers to choose from. Its user list includes famous names like Twitter, Microsoft, and Airbnb.
• CrossBrowserTesting. This all-in-one, which competes directly with BrowserStack, conducts automated simultaneous tests for over 1,500 browsers and devices.
• Websiteresponsivetest. The application uses the site’s URL to display online content on various devices and screen sizes.
• Device Mode in Google DevTools. Developers can easily imitate mobile devices in the Chrome browser with this emulator utility.
• Google Resizer. This tool allows developers to view a site throughout Material Design breakpoints for desktop and mobile, with recommendations on breakpoints, responsive layouts, surface behaviours, and user interface designs.
• Responsinator. This tool shows how a website looks on various screen sizes and forms. It enables designers to interact with the website by clicking links, typing into search areas, and more.

Challenges of Testing Responsive Design

Let’s look at some of the most common issues with responsive web design.

• Touch vs. mouse. Customers actually use a mouse to navigate and select items on desktop versions of websites. Users of handheld devices, on the other hand, are more likely to use their hands on their touchscreens.
• Graphics and performance. This issue arises when images or graphics are not downscaled or adjusted to accommodate different devices, resulting in lengthy load times.
• Time for expansion. Unfortunately, flexible web design takes longer to build than a regular website since it must account for a variety of factors such as different platforms, devices, and screen sizes.
• Getting the navigation just right. Navigation is perhaps one of the trickiest components of adaptable web design because desktops have a lot of room for it, whereas smartphones have smaller screens with less room for it. As a result, developers must address clutter and concentrate the most important components of the site in a prominent and easily accessible location for end users.

Responsive Web Testing Tips

• While testing a Responsive Web, keep design consistency in mind, such as picture placement, text spacing around the borders, and so on, across all browsers and operating systems.
• The tester should be familiar with what to test and how to test on many devices at various breakpoints while testing a Responsive Website. It could be exhausting and uncomfortable otherwise.
• The Responsive Website’s major content should be viewable at all breakpoints; for example, if the browser size is changed from desktop to mobile, the primary images, main text, menu, and so on should not alter.
• If the browser is resized for testing, any clickable section of the Responsive Web (such as buttons, menus, sub-links, and so on) should work.
• Only a few big concerns may be identified by resizing the browser and evaluating the responsive website, however there may be a few minor issues on mobile devices relating to finger swipes, tapping, and so on. Defect detection and elimination can be improved by testing these functionalities on actual devices.
• Communication between the tester and the developer is essential for rigorous testing of a responsive website. The developer should assist testers in creating the conditions listed in the test cases’ requirements.
• Examine whether the web pages are viewable at all dimensions, that is, whether the content is accessible even when the browser is resized to fit a mobile screen.

Conclusion

Testing a responsive website is critical for the long-term success of many mobile applications. Mobile users will only grow in number, and their expectations differ significantly from those of desktop users. Implementing Responsive Web Design and thoroughly testing it is a terrific method to ensure that your site meets the standards. 

User experience is critical, as we all know. Providing a fantastic experience to all users, regardless of what device they use to access our website is critical to our business’s success. We may accomplish this with the use of a responsive web design testing checklist. Keep in mind, though, that responsive design testing is a continual effort, not a one-time event. We’ll have to keep doing that because new devices are released every other day. Responsive web design testing is especially important nowadays because mobile usage contributes to more traffic than ever before, necessitating the need for companies with a digital presence to recognize this shift and generate responsive websites that can adapt easily. Responsive web design must adapt to deal with the challenges of new trends in desktop and mobile websites, from virtual reality to augmented reality applications.