Thoughts on Efficient Test Design #2
Responsive Design, a design approach from UI, is used to ensure that content and screen sizes are compatible. Would you not want different elements to have various sizes concerning other design objects?
That would make your design look like a zigzag puzzle. Therefore, designers would size elements concerning their corresponding relative units (%) to use media queries to identify different things in the environment your website depends on. These steps ensure that your design and browser area is consistent across devices.
Responsive Design is a setup where your server sends the exact HTML code to different devices. You can use CSS to change the page's appearance on a particular device. With responsive Design, you can serve all devices with the same code that adapts to the screen size.
Google's algorithms automatically detect if the Googlebot user agent can crawl the page along with the assets, be it images, JavaScript or CSS. You can use the <meta name=" viewport"> tag to tell your browser to adjust its content. You can add a meta tag to the document header:
The meta viewport tag allows you to give your browser the necessary instructions to adjust and scale the required dimensions and page width. Due to the lack of a meta viewport element, mobile browsers would render the desktop screen width of the page as the default. The usual size is 980px, although there may be variations on different devices.
The purpose of mobile web browser testing or responsive testing is to make your content look better by increasing the font size and scaling the content to fit the screen. Only an intelligent part of the content that includes the screen is displayed.
In the case of responsive images, you can include the element. Generally, this tag will work with different algorithms if your website runs on a newer browser like Apple Mobile Safari or Google Chrome.
The mobile browser will assume the desktop width and call page customization if you have a page without a specific meta viewport. This can make your content extremely difficult to read. On the other hand, if you have the same page with a particular viewport that matches the device's width, your mobile browser would not scale your page, so your content is readable.
For any user, the font sizes may appear inconsistent, so the user has to pinch-to-zoom or double-tap to enlarge the page to see and interact with the content. There are also instances when Google does not classify a page as mobile-friendly because it requires flawless interaction with mobile devices. When redirecting the user agent, there are high chances of bugs and errors, which can affect your website's user performance.
Responsive Design can be the solution to all these problems.
Why is Responsive Design so popular?
In the early 2010s, the era of mobile users began to dominate desktop users. This led designers to think about different solutions for user experience. They had the option to combine various designs into one and provide fixed dimensions for each of them. This approach is called adaptive Design. You can also opt for a single, flexible format that shrinks or stretches to fit your screen, also called responsive Design. A responsive design checklist is always better to stay ahead of your testing needs.
Designers and businesses consider responsive Design an intelligent option. Instead of working with absolute units, be it pixels or images on different versions, designers could focus on a single design that fills every "container." Even though responsive Design has shortcomings, it has many advantages that outweigh the challenges of responsive web design. It is becoming the norm with many accessible frameworks, leading to responsive Design becoming one of Google's top features.
What are the advantages and disadvantages of Responsive Design
Advantages
- Provide seamlessness and uniformity.
- You can use many CMS frameworks, be it Bootstrap or WordPress.
- It is easy and inexpensive to implement.
- It can be SEO-friendly.
- Ensure a simple/minimalistic design
Disadvantages
- It only gives control over design screen sizes.
- Each element can move depending on its base.
- Potential problems with different ad formats.
- You will get longer loading times on different mobile devices.
- You get complicated front-end code for scaling the content.
Final thoughts
Responsive design is one of the most popular approaches to creating websites. It uses flexible images, layouts, and media queries of cascading style sheets. Its primary goal is to create different web pages that recognize visitors’ screen orientation and size and change the website's layout.
These are some of the recommended techniques for responsive design: eliminate friction. Make sure the typography is responsive. Take advantage of conditional loading and native hardware on mobile devices. Consider landscape orientation. Ensure the adaptability of layouts.
With a responsive website, the content or layout can adapt to the screen size on which it is displayed. It would also automatically adjust to the device you use to read it.
Our next article will discuss tools, technical aspects, and reasons to use Responsive Design. Happy testing!
