In defense of two-state theme toggles

I had no idea people had so strong feelings about theme toggles. I know some applications offer the choice, but I imagined it was because a small set of developers took it as a fun challenge to implement. One of my banking apps has a theme toggle. I look at that app twice a month to see if I need to rebalance the savings portfolio. It doesn't need a theme toggle. Clearly, the toggle is just the result of a scheduled "fun sprint" in between real work. Right?

But this article implies a theme toggle is table stakes for new development, as implied by the parenthetical:

> (despite the irony that the site that post is published on offers no theming or theme toggle at all)

Like... is that something a website should do? Does this come from a bubble, or have UX people in the industry more broadly moved past "should we provide a theme toggle" into "what is the optimal shape of the theme toggle we obviously must have"?

Maybe I'm old, but I don't expect developers of things to produce multiple themes to suit different preferences. It seems like a complete waste of their time. That time could better be used to improve functionality, fix bugs and stability, or increase behavioural tracking for more specifically targeted advertisements.

It's not that complicated.

Default to system, use two states, and integrate the toggle in a top level UI context as a single icon that flips between sun/moon. Putting it deep in a menu is what creates all this pretentious hedging because we're subconsciously worried about the user not being able to get to it.

How common is offering a dark mode outside particularly programmer-y/designer-y spaces?

We'd like to but don't currently offer it because it would be a fairly involved undertaking - we have a lot of images that would need to be updated with corresponding dark versions to not look out of place.

As far as I'm aware though we've only received a single request for such a feature, and that request was wildly over the top exclaiming that out site lit their eyeballs on fire.

I’m interested if the average user really cares about it all that much for web apps and blogs etc.

Some apps I’ve used in dark mode long enough it would be weird if it switched. But new things I use I don’t really go looking for it.

I hate frontend devs that think of themselves smarter than their users and try to be smart about stuff. Just show me the available states, thank you very much. If users don't know/understand something, you don't help them by hiding it even further from them. Do your part in educating them by simply exposing them to the concept. This isn't rocket science, just a switch with three states. Empower your users! Not make yourself the arbiter of features.

> Despite spending hours a day looking at her phone, she literally had to check it to find out what her default color theme is; it’s that invisible to her.

Sounds like a good reason to make it automatic then, because if users have to find your state toggle in some hamburger menu, they're not going to use it if they don't even know the system has a theme applied.

> Despite spending hours a day looking at her phone, she literally had to check it to find out what her default color theme is; it’s that invisible to her. (Interestingly: she herself was surprised to find out she’s actually been looking at dark mode this whole time without even realizing it).

My wife’s phone has been in dark mode since before I married her, but most of the apps she cares about either don’t support dark mode (at least on her version of Android, older Samsung) or she has manually chosen light mode. The system preference and ability to swap it at night time or whatever is thus a bit of a mockery. (I mentioned it once, but didn’t change anything.)

>Under the hood, rather than explicitly toggling between “light” or “dark”, it toggles between falling back to the system setting, and the opposite of the system setting.

Not sure I like this. Suppose my system is in dark mode because of low battery, but I want to read a page in light mode, so I change it. The next time I open the page with full battery (and thus system light mode), the page will render dark again...

> That is: rather than saving either a light or dark theme preference permanently in localStorage, Dr. Verou’s implementation stores your preference only if that preference is different than your device setting. In that case, the site saves whatever theme that happens to be.

Ironically enough, with the dark mode CSS, the inline code span is unreadable.

If the site defaults to system (which isn't guaranteed), very few people will need the toggle, at which point it can be omitted, or at least hidden deep in settings, and there is no need to put so much thought into its design.

I read this up until the monospaced use of the term `localStorage`, which for me (Firefox on Android) got rendered with a white background but did not invert the font, making it unreadable without highlighting it. I don't think I'm interested in someone's take on light versus dark theme if they don't seem to actually know how to make their own website work right with dark theme.

Having a light mode and a dark mode as the target of the setting, makes it impossible to use a light area versus a dark area to meaningfully suggest visually which one is selected. This stymies the designer completely, apparently.

I started using computers in the era where customisation and user preferences were “allowed” by software companies. Think the Windows 98 or even Windows 7 theme dialog vs modern Windows. I personally reject this seemingly forced binary choice of light and dark.

Because of this for my site I have four themes, light, summer sunshine, forest, and dark. I’ve seen some sites where the theme is an RGB colour picker even.

In regards to the article, that’s a lot of consternation and frustrating statements about toggles and tri-state toggles. A simple button with a dynamic icon works well as soon as you want to cycle through more than two choices.

It annoys me to not be able to reset a preference so I always give the third option: for light/dark and for the language.

There is a weird appeal to authority randomly added at the end of the article. Just because someone with a PhD has an idea on what may be good for users doesn't prove it actually is. Such a decision should be grounded in user studies and telemetry.

Why are UI people so determined to make apps as opaque and unusable as possible?

> rather than explicitly toggling between “light” or “dark”, it toggles between falling back to the system setting, and the opposite of the system setting.

Absolutely NOT.

> this unavoidably indicates that some number of users don’t even know what their system theme is—or might not even understand what “system” means in the first place!

Especially these people should NOT be given two state setting that depends on something third they do not know about. Yes, some people do not care about dark vs light setting. Let them not care.

I think I'd just separate the two things:

``` Theme ( ) Light (•) Dark

[x] Follow system Dark — currently controlled by system ```

When "Follow system" is on, the theme choice is greyed out.

Feels simpler to me, and it scales better if themes ever become more than just light/dark.