Websites have always had an uncomfortable habit of working particularly well on the device used to build them. This is not especially impressive. The real test begins elsewhere.
A modern site may be encountered on a large desktop monitor, a small laptop, an old smartphone, a new smartphone, a tablet or a device with settings and software the development team never considered.
Responsive does not simply mean smaller
A responsive website should do more than squeeze a desktop composition until it fits on a phone. Priorities change with the available space, navigation may need to behave differently, hover effects cease to exist on touchscreens and text that looked restrained on a desktop may become exhausting when wrapped into narrow columns.
The useful question is not whether the same layout survived. It is whether the same job remains easy to perform.
Test somewhere inconvenient
Development environments are usually fast, stable and modern. Real users can be considerably less fortunate.
- slower connections
- smaller or older devices
- different browsers
- touch rather than mouse input
- increased text size
- portrait and landscape orientations
- reduced bandwidth or battery-saving modes
Not every site needs to support every device ever manufactured. There has to be a sensible boundary. But that boundary should be decided consciously rather than discovered through customer complaints.
Technology should disappear behind the task
Most visitors do not care which framework produced the site, how elegant the code is or whether the development team used the latest fashionable tool. They care whether they can find the information, complete the task and move on.
Fred does not need your website to impress his device. He needs it to work on it.
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