Getting started with creating a mobile-friendly test? Yes? Then, we highly recommend you to start investing in responsive testing. It is the process of ensuring that your application is able to adapt to the changing resolution, screen size, and other physical parameters of a mobile device. Considering the variation of current mobile devices, it has become a compulsory parameter of the entire testing workflow.
Unfamiliar with responsive testing? Don’t worry! We are here for you. Our article will help you understand the basics of responsive testing, its importance in modern test cases, and how you can use various strategies and best practices to implement it.
What Is Responsive Testing
Don’t even know what is responsive testing? It is the process of verifying how your website or web application behaves and looks like when it is run on different devices, screen sizes, and screen orientations.
When we come to testing, it is a specialized segment to ensure that the design and functionality smoothly adapt to the user’s context. It will be valid whether they are browsing on a large desktop screen or on a pocket-sized smartphone display.
With thousands of different devices and operating system combinations that can be currently accessed, the responsive testing process has transformed into a very strategic and planned execution. By properly implementing this parameter, you can guarantee that your end-user experience is reputable, conversive, and satisfactory.
To further understand the role of responsive testing in a modern application development process, let us divert our parameters to some of the major reasons that justify the importance of this inclusion:
- Can you take a wild guess on the total number of mobile users globally? You’ll be shocked to know that it is over 56%! This statistic is alone enough to justify the focus on mobile devices and the experience that the users will have. If your website doesn’t appeal to the small screen users, you lose a huge section of your potential users.
- By implementing responsive design, you are giving an aesthetically pleasing and easy to use interface to your customers without worrying about their current device. This is because by adapting the site layout as per the viewport size, all the important information becomes more prominent and easy to navigate.
- Over the past couple of years, Google search analytics has phased into a mobile-first approach. This means that the websites that have been designed to look and feel good on mobile devices will automatically be ranked well in all Google search results. Therefore, investing in responsive design also has a huge SEO benefit.
- By investing in responsive design, you will realize that it is a very cost efficient way as you do not have to separate websites for all the devices that you’ll be targeting with your web application. Moreover with responsive design, you can reuse a huge section of the existing code in future applications as well.
- We all know that the current mobile industry will only continue to increase by adding new devices and layout options. However, if you start investing in responsive design, you will be able to scale with this that was previously impossible with fixed layouts.
The Core Of Responsive Testing
To fully understand what is responsive design and how it can benefit the modern application testing scenarios, you must have a key understanding about all the foundational segments of this approach:
● Fluid Grids
You no longer have to use fixed pixel-based layouts. Instead, employ fluid grids where elements are sized proportionally depending on the screen size. The major benefit of this process is that all the components on your app can scale in relation to one another to maintain consistency across multiple resolutions.
● Media Queries
The media queries option that is available in CSS will allow you to implement conditional styles depending on device characteristics like screen width, height, or orientation. For example, media queries will allow you to implement different styles on your application elements depending on the orientation in which the user is using it.
● Flexible Images and Videos
When you add multiple media assets to your web application, it becomes very important to ensure that these assets are scaling appropriately depending on screen size and orientation. To deploy this, responsive design testing allows you to implement various parameters like “max-width” to help keep the images contained within their parent elements.
● Mobile-First Approach
A very popular and effective way of creating responsive design is to start with the smallest device first, the mobile device. Then, depending on the success you receive on these devices, you can enhance the layout appropriately for bigger skins as well.
The psychology behind this approach is that by focusing on the mobile experience first, the designers have to guarantee that the site is usable under the most constrained conditions. Therefore, when the screen sizes naturally begin to expand, the app will automatically look good.
● Performance Considerations
A very important segment of responsive design is to ensure the proper performance of the application on both mobile and desktop devices. What’s the benchmark, you ask? You should always target that your mobile applications are loading in under 2 seconds.
A very common practice is to have smaller images on mobile versions of the website to conserve bandwidth and also improve the overall performance.
The Process Of Responsive Testing
Excited about executing responsive testing on your mobile applications? To help you begin this process, we have mentioned all the steps that you must follow for the proper implementation:
- This entire execution begins by first identifying all the devices and browsers that you are going to target with your test cases. If you are a new tester or a first-time app-developing company, we would strongly recommend to survey the market and choose the most popular options in each of the above categories.
- The next step involves finding all the critical components on your mobile application. Why? Depending on this information, you can create the testing strategies to focus on these areas at first. This is a very important parameter to ensure that at least all the basic features are functional in all instances.
- Although automated testing would be a very important part of the regressive test cases and repetitive test instances, it is very important to combine it with manual testing. Why? This is because there are certain segments of visual testing and exploratory testing that can be missed by automated test cases.
- It is very important to have dedicated test cases to verify the functioning and placement of all the UI elements, depending on the orientation of the screen. You should also have other dedicated test cases to understand how the elements of the application behave depending on the various touch interactions as it is the primary mode of communication for all modern smartphones.
- To ensure that the user can properly use all the components of your application, irrespective of the small screen size, it is important to implement various test cases like text readability testing, UI navigation testing, and proper performance testing.
- You should also have dedicated cases to ensure how the application behaves when the user is having a slow network or high latency bandwidth. This is a very important parameter to ensure the proper functioning of all the elements irrespective of multiple challenging real-world use cases.
- To ensure that your app is accessible with all your users irrespective of disabilities, you must have various forms of accessibility features like text alternatives, keyboard navigation, and high contrast ratios. You should also test the proper functioning of these elements on responsive designs.
Best Practices For Responsive Testing
Finally, let us divert our attention towards some of the best practices that we recommend the testers to incorporate in responsive design testing. These factors will not only help improve the efficiency of the test environment but also ensure that you’re utilizing your full testing potential:
Maintain Consistent Design Patterns
You must focus on creating a design element for your mobile application where the users can easily recognize and understand their navigation elements, call to action buttons, and other interactive features. Moreover, all these elements must be recognizable irrespective of the device the users have.
To achieve such a consistent design framework, you must have robust CSS architecture and component libraries. These inclusions will also help you to unify the user experience.
Use Cloud Testing
Since real device testing is such an important part of modern responsive design test cases, you simply cannot skip this configuration. However, we do recognize that it is a very expensive and time-consuming process to set up and maintain a physical device lab.
If you want to achieve test cases with the same accuracy but eliminate an onsite device lab, you should consider investing in cloud-based platforms like LambdaTest. LambdaTest is an AI-native test orchestration and execution platform that lets you perform manual and automation testing at scale with over 3000+ browsers, OS combinations, and 5000+ real devices.
LambdaTest also allows you to integrate Appium with Selenium mobile testing to run various advanced processes like automated mobile app testing and automated mobile cross-browser testing. We have given a sample code below to further help you with the understanding:
Prioritize Performance
Even if you manage to create a highly beautiful responsive design, it will not matter at all if it takes a huge time to load on mobile devices. To reduce the load time and improve performance, you should invest in techniques like lazy loading images, minifying CSS and JavaScript elements and caching techniques.
We also suggest you run that performance test of your application under real world network conditions to ensure that your app is reliable and stable.
The Bottom Line
Based on all the areas that we explored in this article, we can easily come to the conclusion that responsive testing has changed into one of the most important parts of the modern application development and testing life cycle. From selecting the right components of responsive testing, to having the right tool to implement it, every segment of it has a very important role in ensuring the overall success.
You should also remember that combining manual testing and automation testing is also a very important part of ensuring the success of all your responsive testing approaches. This is because the final approach isn’t only about how the website looks, but it’s also about how it performs on different devices and use cases.
Finally, we would strongly request you to keep your eyes open for all the upcoming trends in this market. By doing this, you will be able to provide nothing but the best experience to your customers.
