The Future is Dark
Six weeks ago Punxsutawney Phil, a groundhog in Punxsutawney, Pennsylvania, ostensibly gazed upon his shadow. As legend has it, that gaze prognosticated six additional weeks of winter.
When I read that news, I admit I felt an air of melancholy surrounding me. I don’t buy into superstition and see myself as a fairly levelheaded, judicious person. Yet for some reason I couldn’t deal with the fact that, after all we’ve been through in these dark and gloomy times of social distancing, isolation, loneliness and disease, an incognizant groundhog somewhere in Pennsylvania predicted a prolonged winter — or so we were told.
Now, six weeks later, even though the rodent’s conjecture was somewhat lacking in meticulosity, we can finally say it’s spring: the days are longer, the tulips are springing, people are being inoculated, and the cicadas are on their way — yikes!
But back to darkness.
Darkness, in the past year, was also a central theme in web development and UI/UX design. Not in a bad way, but in a good way! In the year 2020, all major operating systems introduced a dark color scheme as an interface option to their users. And not only that; all major browsers now support the “prefers-color-scheme” CSS media feature, which was introduced by the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) in the Media Queries Level 5 specification as a way for websites to detect if the user has set their system to use a light or dark color theme.
Now there’s no turning back. People really love this feature, and even though we’ve always been able to design websites and apps this way, it’s never really made sense until now.
Users don’t want to manually configure the color scheme on the increasingly growing list of websites and applications they use on a day-to-day basis, so the ability to adopt preference settings in the user’s operating system makes perfect sense.
Personally I like both modes, so I set my devices’ settings to “auto,” which makes the interface shift from light during the day to dark during the night.
I realized how accustomed I had grown to this a few weeks ago when I was mindlessly scrolling through social media — in dark mode — just after going to bed (I know, a bad habit). I clicked on something and — OMG MY EYES!
In an instant, I was thrown into circadian misalignment. I put the phone down angrily and almost felt as if I’d been attacked. And in a way I was — humans and all animals are just organic computers, and it takes a long time for our software to update to changes in our environment. After all, we evolved for millions of years in conditions where the pattern of our daily light and darkness exposure was consistent and unchanging. Evolution hasn’t caught up with Edison yet, so we’re just going to have to design our technology around our biology.
This is why dark mode has become so popular — it’s natural to us as humans, and probably groundhogs, too. Which is why if I had to prophesize, I would say that increasingly people will expect the digital products they use to respond in this way. And in six years, building a website or an app with just one color scheme would be like building a non-mobile friendly website today.
At the end of the day, web developers are usually just building something that’s going to be used by the public, so accessibility, usability, and inclusion should always be our mantra.