Responsive Web Design: A Review of National Geographic's Website

COIT 20268 - Responsive Web Design (RWD)

Table of Contents
Introduction.....................................................................................................................................2
Overview..........................................................................................................................................3
Main features of the website..........................................................................................................5
Positive and negative aspects of website........................................................................................6
Positive aspects:..........................................................................................................................6
Negative aspects:.........................................................................................................................6
User reviews and feedbacks............................................................................................................7
Responsive web design....................................................................................................................9
Simulator tool................................................................................................................................11
Recommendation..........................................................................................................................15
Conclusion......................................................................................................................................16
References.....................................................................................................................................17
1

Introduction
In the 21st century we can see a rapid growth in the types of devices that have been flourishing
the market. From laptops that display very large screens to the wearable watches, that display
a very tiny screen, all have become the part of our day-to-day life. But to keep them functional
their main purpose that is surfing the internet needs to be fulfilled. For this, designers and
developers should make their site so responsive as to fit each and every screen type to give a
very good user experience. The User Interface design is one the essential parts while making a
website, so it is important that every aspect of the designing are considered seriously and every
component in the website is chosen carefully and according to the device.
In this report we are going to review how responsive, the website of National Geographic is and
what are some common responsive design patterns it has followed to work across different
devices.
2

Overview
Responsive websites make the web page look good on devices (desktops, phones, and tablets).
It mostly uses HTML and CSS. Nowadays we see a large number of devices, they might have
very small screens like electronic watches or they might have screens as large as the full-size
laptop. The main aim of studying the responsive designing is directly related to making the
website adjustable on all kind of devices. It is basically the combination of grids, images and
media queries. HTML and CSS are used to move, hide, resize on the screen.
Nowadays, use of mobile devices is growing exponentially but not much of the websites are
optimized according to the mobile phones or the changing configurations. Mobile devices, as
we know are constrained by display size and require a different approach when deciding upon
the layout. You cannot simply list out things in a mobile phone, you need to know when and
where to put the combo box. The responsive design responds to the needs of the users and the
device they are using.
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Description
The national geographic website provides a huge amount of researched information on
engineering, history, science, people, wildlife, nature, space, and travel. Among the countries of
the world, it mainly focuses on Australia. It provides this information via photos, videos and
written content on the site. This site also covers topics that affect people in their day-to-day
life. It has tried to cover social issues too. The website also contains certain games and also
shows T.V shows, Nat Geo Snaps, and Events. It contains a huge database of pictures and videos
from all around the world. The user can register on the website, create his account and then
can access the large amount of information that is provided by the National Geographic. It
contains a large amount of study material and things unknown to the world. The researchers all
over the world have tried to unveil different aspects of society and wildlife through this
website. The user can just log in and mark his favorite topics. Next time he opens the site he
will get all the recent insights of the chosen topic. The website also provides the facility of e-
books which can be purchased and read on the site. For big and small businesses, the National
Geographic society provides ad spaces, where they can place their ads by paying some amount
of money to the society (Baloglu, 2006).
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Main features of the website
The National Geographic website provides ample number of features;
 One can explore numerous topics like science, space, engineering, travel, people,
Australia, nature, wildlife, and history.
 Also, there are TV shows and TV guides in context with Australia.
 The website provides games like Fact or Fiction, Jetman, My Brilliant Brain, Are they
Identical and Crocs and Logs, where a user can make high scores and lay with online
players.
 You can subscribe for newsletters from National Geographic. They will mail you any new
findings of your favorite topic.
 Under the shop sections, National Geographic website, allows you to read and buy e-
books (Cyr, 2005).
 Also, there is a section-“Your Snap”, where the users can upload their own clicks. Users
can also share their findings and experience with the world.
 It has a rich gallery consisting of High-Quality pictures.
 Animation has been used on the website. On the home page of the website, you can see
the slide view with pictures making the transition effect.
 The website also consists of Facebook and Twitter option where you can follow their
page and can interact with the team.
 The navigation of pages is smooth and directional.
 When you open the same website on a mobile device you will see that grid view has
transformed to the list view to improving the user experience (Rosen, 2004).
5

Positive and negative aspects of website
For every website, there is some positive and negative aspect. For the national geographic
website, the positive and negative aspects are described below:
Positive aspects:
a. The website is user-friendly and provides a very good user experience.
b. The website has been laid down on a grid view and includes a slider showing some
selected pictures.
c. The content of the website is well researched.
d. The font used on the website is appropriate according to the requirement.
e. The smooth navigation of the website shows the thoughtfulness of the developer.
f. The template used in the website supports the complex structure of this website very
well.
g. The images used on the website are colorful and vibrant. They have used all high-quality
pictures (EL Mansour, 2007).
Negative aspects:
a. The animation can only be seen on the home page. When making a transition from one
page to another, the animation is not quite maintained.
b. Others pages contentless content than the homepage.
c. The accessibility of some feature is not proper which make it poor accessible website.
d. The color chosen does not seem appropriate.
e. There is no search box to search for the relevant and specific topic (Huang, 2003).
6

User reviews and feedbacks
Below develops the questionnaire for the user as a review of the website:
For any services to be successful, user feedback is very important. Therefore, we developed a
questionnaire to get an insight of what users think about the website.
User 1:
S. No Questions Rating(Out of 10)
1 How will you rate the overall look of the website? 8
2 How helpful was the content? 10
3 Were all pictures High Quality? 5
4 Were you able to read everything clearly? 7
5 Is the website user-friendly? 7
6 Is everything functioning properly? 5
7 Was mobile version easy and handy? 8
8 Did you get stuck on any part? 4
9 Did you find buying e-books easy on this website? 9
10 Are you satisfied with the navigation? 6
Information on User 1:
Name: Caitlin Hunt
Age: 24
Gender: Female
Profession: Reporter
Comments: The look of the website is amazing. I loved the wildlife section. The pictures
taken are very accurate and to the point. This website helped me connect
to some of the leading photographers of the country. Absolutely amazing.
User 2:
S. No Questions Rating(Out of 10)
1 How will you rate the overall look of the website? 8
2 How helpful was the content? 10
3 Were all pictures High Quality? 5
4 Were you able to read everything clearly? 7
5 Is the website user-friendly? 7
6 Is everything functioning properly? 5
7 Was mobile version easy and handy? 8
8 Did you get stuck on any part? 4
9 Did you find buying e-books easy on this website? 9
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10 Are you satisfied with the navigation? 6
Information on User 2:
Name: Rory Kester
Age: 34
Gender: Male
Profession: Engineer
Comments: The site has lots of information. I can say it’s a knowledge database. I like
reading about new topics and findings. The animation that has been given on
the website makes the site more attractive.
In this, both the users are using the same desktop view. Looking at their feedback it can be
concluded that the overall website is very good and well maintained.
8

Responsive web design
The responsive websites are those that provide a good user experience and rearrange itself
according to the device it is running on. There are basically nine principles for responsive web
design (Dynamics, 2017). All the nine principles are defined below:
1. Responsive vs adaptive web design: Responsive and adaptive designs might look same
but logically both are different. They both are dependent on the type of content the
page needs to display. In the National Geographic website, responsive web design is
followed. When we view the site on the phone the grid view of 3 columns (in desktop)
rearranges itself in 1 column (in a mobile device).
2. Flow: Whenever the screen of the device gets small, the components are shrined into
vertical form rather than horizontal. Like the 3 columns of the grid view in desktop
shrinks to 1 column in the mobile phone (Natda, 2013).
3. Relative units: The used canvas can be mobile, desktop or any screen in between these
two. The pixel density can be varying according to screen so to resolve this issue a unit
should is needed which are flexible and can be used. The units are of two type one is a
static unit and second is a relative unit. In relative unit, the data is in percentage and the
static data present in pixels. For national geographic website the test is done and
described below:
4. Breakpoints: The breakpoint principle allows the layout to change the predefined points
for e.g. in desktop view the website has three columns and if the page size is reduced
which turns in mobile view and move into a single column.
5. Minimum and maximum values: In this principle sometimes the content of screen
occupies the whole width of the screen like on a mobile device, but having some
content stretch to the whole width of TV makes less sense.
6. Nested Objects: Whenever size of the page is change, the entire object on the screen
moved at same time. Whenever page size is altering the images are also shifted
according to the size of page (Nene, 2015).
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7. Desktop or mobile first: It does not create major difference but adds some additional
limitations when the application is developed in mobile first. The website can be
developed on any platform.
8. Web fonts and system fonts: This principle makes the website more responsive. At the
time of developing the website, the fonts of the website design according to the
requirements. The web fonts are looks attractive but take a longer time to upload the
image while on the other hand, the system fonts help to load the website fast.
9. Bitmap or images or vector: When there is need of including lot of details or some fancy
effects then at that time bitmap can be used. In png, jpg, gif the bitmap is used. For
using the icon or SVG the vector is used.
10

Simulator tool
Chrome simulator tool: Chrome is a very fast browser created by Google which uses Web kit
layout engine. It is known for its minimalistic design. It loads and displays pages quickly. Dragging
tabs is easy. The start-up page displays all the frequently visited pages so the user can quickly
access the pages important to him. It automatically translates the pages into the language you
understand. If any site crashes on one of your tabs, other tabs are not affected. The alteration
can be done in color and theme of the browser. It is faster than Explorer and Firefox. Installation
is easy (Soares, 2012).
Large Display: Devices such as desktops and laptops display large screens. They display greater
than 1280x768 pixels screen.
Figure 1 chrome simulator large resolution
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Medium Display: It describes the mobile devices with display approximately 480x640 to
700x960 pixels both in landscape and portrait orientation.
Figure 2 chrome simulator medium resolution
Tiny Display: It describes the mobile devices with display approximately 200x320 to 400x640
pixels both in landscape and portrait orientation.
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Figure 3 chrome simulator tiny resolution
Browser Stack
Browser Stack is a cross-browser testing tool, where you can see the layout of your website on
different browsers and devices to develop better responsive sites. It improves functional testing
by harnessing the industry standard in test automation. It lets you putt on more than 1100
browsers and Android and iOS emulators. You just need to change some lines of code in
Selenium to integrate with Browser Stack. It ensures that the website or the application s easily
accessible to a wide range of audiences. To test the website you just need to type the URL and
choose the targeted browser and the operating system. It tests the website in real time using
virtual network computing screen share. The responsive screenshot testing services enable the
user to test the website using actual device sizes (GArrish, 2011).
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Issues with Responsive Sites:
As the types of devices are increasing we need to think more about the aspects of user
experience.
For making a responsive website, we need to address these issues as well:
Mouse v. touch: Designing for mobile devices also brings up the issue of mouse versus touch.
On desktop computers, the user normally has a mouse to navigate and select items. On a
smartphone or tablet, the user mostly is using fingers and touching the screen. What may
seem easy to select with a mouse, may be hard to select with a finger on a tiny spot on a
screen. The Web designer must take “touch” into consideration.
Graphics and download speed: Also, there’s the issue of graphics, ads and download speed.
On mobile devices, it may be wise to display fewer graphics than for desktop views so that a
site doesn’t take forever to load on a smartphone. Larger and sizes may need to be exchanged
for smaller ads.
Apps and “mobile versions”: In the past, you might have thought about creating an app for
your website — say an iPad app or an Android app. Or you would have a mobile version
specifically for BlackBerry.
But with so many different devices today, it’s getting harder to create apps and versions for
every device and operating platform. As Smashing Magazine wrote, “When will the madness
stop? It won’t, of course.” A responsive design that is flexible enough to be viewed on multiple
devices just makes sense (Harrington, 2003).
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Recommendation
 When switching from desktop to mobile site, National Geographic could have used
ListView instead of Grid view to display its videos.
 They need to add more animation to pages other than the homepage.
 They need to keep less content on the homepage as homepage seems very congested.
 They need to improve the accessibility of certain features.
 They need to include more T.V shows and they also need to include the episodes which
they telecast on the television.
 They need to choose appropriate colors and see that the colors do not camouflage.
 The most important thing, search box needs to be added so that user does not have to
scan the whole content to find the content he was looking for:
a. The animation can only be seen on the home page. When making a transition
from one page to another, the animation is not quite maintained.
b. Others pages contentless content than the homepage.
c. The accessibility of some feature is not proper which make it poor accessible
website.
d. The colors chosen do not seem appropriate.
e. There is no search box to search for the relevant and specific topic (Desmurget,
2009).
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Conclusion
In this report, we have reviewed on the responsiveness and the responsive design patterns
used by National Geographic in its website. They used Grid layout, Images, and Video views to
shoe their valuable content. National Geographic has tried to build a website that is compatible
with almost all devices whether a laptop or a phone. The content was easily accessible and the
user experience has also been taken care of. They have used the most advanced grid view that
is the grid-style which allows different fonts for the breakpoints and much more. The website
has been built using HTML and CSS. In this report, we have also compared chrome and a
browser simulator called BrowserStack, which is a cloud, based technology and provides a
browser, device, and operating system simulators to test our website and applications online.
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References
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Katzenellenbogen, B. S. (2003). Activities of estrogen receptor alpha-and beta-selective
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encounters. computers in Human Behavior, 19(4), 425-442.
 Natda, K. V. (2013). Responsive web design. Eduvantage, 1(1).
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Computer Science, 4(03).
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landscape. Journal of Business Research, 57(7), 787-794.
 Soares, J., Canizes, B., Lobo, C., Vale, Z., & Morais, H. (2012). Electric vehicle scenario
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