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Responsive design is nice and is a very good and useful tool. If done right, it makes your site react better for a larger group of users. However, your QA tim
by programminggeek 14y ago
Responsive design is nice and is a very good and useful tool. If done right, it makes your site react better for a larger group of users.
However, your QA time and effort explodes when you do responsive layout. Your testing matrix goes from basically 2 operating systems and 4 browsers all at a fairly standard screen resolution target to supporting 4+ operating systems, 6+ browsers, and at the very least 4 significantly different resolutions/form factors as well as the ability for the user to change orientation.
Visual bug testing and layout issues add a ton of work and testing, especially at the beginning of a project.
Also, making a WHOLE site with multiple different areas, layouts, functionality responsive is a lot different than just making a single blog layout responsive.
- squarecat 14y agoI totally forgot to mention the testing in my rant...
- mrj 14y agoWait, so what is the alternative? If you're going to develop several different layouts, you have to still test them each, anyhow. The only way out of the testing morass is to simply not target or optimize for some set of devices. I don't think that is the answer.
- aliston 14y agoIn practice, I just don't think that's the case. The entire point of a responsive layout is that you don't have to test against every possible resolution - most responsive websites have 2, maybe 3 conceptual layouts. You can get sufficient coverage by separating the layout testing from the site logic - test the layout on desktop with varying window sizes and then test site logic on the major mobile platforms. That usually means 4 desktop browsers with varying window sizes and 3 mobile browsers... not too bad.