I talk a lot about how “empathy” in commercial UX is mostly a posture because in reality capitalism doesn’t care, but it’s important to consider the additional problem of people in charge who are too shallow to be capable of understanding “why” some people prefer, or need, to do things differently than they do.
This one time I was telling the ceo/founder of a startup I worked for that our react app was making my new macbook pro crawl and we need to fix that because it was a b2b product that would be used by people in finance offices decked out with dell opticrap machines. He responded with surprise “wow, steve. you really care about people don’t you?”
I was kinda floored. Anyway, here we are…
https://web.archive.org/web/20230727121010/https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1684491212219359232
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nothing wrong with not having one. Having one and removing it because you like the dark mode better, on the other hand? He’s been told that every design decision has to consider light and dark. Just like he’s going to be told that the web app requires more dev resources for browser compatibility testing, accessibility, performance etc and more design resources for responsiveness and stuff like mouse vs touch.
If he drops light mode he can cut more staff for sure. If he drops web, he can cut even more. He will do it.
but anyway, light mode/dark mode are a great example of corps doing something good in the bare minimum way. Before apple or whoever branded black backgrounds and white text as “dark mode” implementing an alternative UI theme based on accessibility concerns on a major web app would have been impossible to get approved.
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I’m speaking in the sense that he’s a desperate idiot trying to make twitter cost him as little as possible. He’s walking around that hell hole asking for ideas on cutting costs.
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Except if you cut development costs your app will suffer, and thus be less profitable. If people don’t want to use your app because it’s a pain to use, then you’re cutting out a part of your userbase… and thus a source of profit.
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but fascism is a core functionality!
For some it’s just personal preference, for some with vision issues it’s unreadable
What’s the benefit to removing one and forcing everyone to use the other?
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If “X” can’t handle a light mode and a dark mode, then that’s not a very good sign…
You’re acting like they need to code a whole new app rather than a single if/then statements with different color values.
Do you have any idea what you’re talking about?
don’t underestimate the work that goes into maintaining two UI themes on that level. Every new thing has to cater for both themes by the designers. Those colour values are easy for devs IF the css is built to accommodate. It very rarely is… and by rarely I mean never, but say rarely to appease the devs seeing this who think they’ve built something that accommodates it.
You set up a table for each.
If you’re adding one thing that needs a color value, you just add a color to each table rather than a single color…
It’s honestly not complicated or time consuming. Especially when two versions already exist…
For the love of… they are freaking twitter! It is one of the most used user interfaces in the world! I think they can spring for the necessary dev resources to maintain a UI that can support multiple modes.