Bringing Sanity and Order to Device Testing

This article is part of a web dev series from Microsoft. Thank you for supporting the partners who make SitePoint possible.

It seems like every other day the public is granted some new means of accessing the web. Some days it’s a new browser. Others it’s a new smartphone. Or a tablet. Or an e-reader. Or a video game console. Or a smartwatch. Or a TV. Or a heads-up display. Or a car. Or a refrigerator.

I worked on one project where the client provided me with a spreadsheet detailing 1,400 different user agents that accessed the login screen for the m-dot site. In two days!

As further evidence, consider the enlightening details of this post from Jason Samuels of the National Council on Family relations, a non-profit organization:

• In 2008, visits from “mobile” devices accounted for only about 0.1% of their traffic. In 2014, that number had skyrocketed to 14.4%.
• In 2008, they detected 71 different screen resolutions, which is already a lot to consider. By 2014, however, they were seeing 1,000 unique screen resolutions each and every quarter (with over 200 of those recording 10+ visits per quarter).

That last stat blows my mind every time I read it. You can’t design for 200 different screens, let alone 1,000. It’s a fool’s errand. And don’t even think of trying to test on that many devices.

And yet, here we are designing websites that can (and will) go anywhere. We need to thoroughly test because we can’t make any assumptions about the browsers and devices being used to access our content.

Testing can be tedious, time consuming, and costly. Surely there’s a way to make it easier. There sure is: Instead of getting hung up on creating one experience that needs to be nearly identical on every browser, we can be smarter about how we build things and treat experience as a continuum.

We can build websites that are both nimble enough to work on low powered devices over slow networks and smart enough to take advantage of advanced features and sensors when opportunity knocks.

Wha?! We can have our cake and eat it too? Yes. Yes we can.

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by Aaron Gustafson via SitePoint