Do clients really resize browser windows to test responsive design?

We are running SessionCam, a ‘session replay’ and analytics product on our own website; it allows us to watch what users are doing and seeing when they visit our website.

There are plenty of these products out there and we have used many of them and SessionCam is another that we are trialling to work out the pros and cons for clients.

Anyway, watching a few of the session videos taken by SessionCam this morning, what did surprise me was that people and a few of them were resizing our website in their browsers to test whether our website was responsive; desktop, mobile and yes, tablet size.

(skip to 39 seconds)

This surprised (and slightly concerned me) for a few reasons:

1. Who is visiting our website and why do they know to do this?
2. Isn’t this sort of test so 18-months ago, or is it still prevalent?
3. What if our website was adaptive? Do people test with ‘agent switchers’?
   1. We are still having robust internal debates about when (not if) responsive design will be entirely better than adaptive, though there is still a school of thought that in terms of performance (weight, conversion, speed to manage), adaptive is still in the lead; which means that our website could notionally be adaptive and not picked up easily by someone.
4. Clients are doing this?

I’m not sure what you do with the knowledge that people are resizing your website though it is interesting know to they are.

I guess.