A transcript of S03E01, (329) of UX Podcast. James Royal-Lawson and Per Axbom discuss the concept of “dark mode”. What it is, its benefits, and its implications for UX design, user experience and accessibility.
This transcript has been machine generated and checked by Cristian Pavel.
Transcript
Computer voice
Season Three, episode one
Per Axbom
I would agree, but it’s not. You can’t do that without testing. So that’s actually what comes down to, so it depends on context.
James Royal-Lawson
Again, I’m hearing you,
Per Axbom
You’re not agreeing with me,
James Royal-Lawson
But I’m not going to respect your preferences on this one.
[Music]
James Royal-Lawson
This is UX Podcast. I’m James Royal Lawson,
Per Axbom
And I’m Per Axbom.
James Royal-Lawson
And we are two humans here to help you push the boundaries of how user experience is perceived and boost your confidence in the work you do. We’re based in Stockholm, Sweden, and you’re listening to us all over the world, from Fiji to Finland.
James Royal-Lawson
So this is the start of series three, and welcome back, Per! I mean, in the true spirit of sustainability, we decided not to throw you away, and instead…
Per Axbom
Thank you.
James Royal-Lawson
… we’ve replaced bits of you. So, renewed you and brought you back, and you’re now 99 point, what? 6% Per and 0,4% something else.
Per Axbom
Mechanical, I suppose, yeah.
James Royal-Lawson
Cyber Per, and you’re good?
Per Axbom
I’m good. My mechanical heart valve was installed. There was no issues, and I’m feeling as healthy as ever, more so even, of course, than before my operation,
James Royal-Lawson
Which actually, if there’s just one thing you want, it’s to feel better after an operation Anyway, welcome back and welcome to Series Three, and we’re kicking off this season with a topic show. We’re talking about Dark Mode.
James Royal-Lawson
Now I’m not going to make the presumption that everyone knows what Dark Mode is. I mean, it’s really easy to say: “Oh, well, we’re all designers, of course we know what dark mode is”. But we can’t do that. So Per, what is Dark Mode?
Per Axbom
Well, I hardly knew what Dark Mode was, I mean, just a year ago.
James Royal-Lawson
Really?
Per Axbom
I mean, because it essentially means, well, I started getting dark, Dark Mode, I think, by mistake, on my phone, and hadn’t realized where did that come from. Where is this setting? And because the setting obviously can be on your phone, as is usually the case these days, when I come across it, and I apparently some apps prefer dark mode, and they start in dark mode, and then I realize I’m in dark mode because I’m get thrown out from the app and into website. Oh, and then, obviously the background is light there, for some reason.
James Royal-Lawson
Oh, right! Yeah, so you notice the difference because you’ve been in an app, and then you go out of the app to something else that doesn’t respect those settings.
Per Axbom
Exactly. Everything looks differently when some pages open through the internal web browser of the app as well.
James Royal-Lawson
I mean, for me, of course, at least in my Android telephone, then Dark Mode has always been something that has kicked in when the battery gets low. If it goes below a certain percent, and things go over to the operating system on the phone goes over to Dark Mode. And by Dark Mode, we mean where, generally things are based on a dark palette.
So rather than the default of white backgrounds, which, if you’re starting a web page, then often you would have a white background as your starting point, and then you’d build things, layers on top of that white background, generally. Dark Mode is when we switch this round and we have generally a dark color at the bottom, and you work up from that in darker toned.
Per Axbom
Which, of course, is how some people actually design their websites from the start.
James Royal-Lawson
Yes.
Per Axbom
So some websites are designed to have a dark background or a black background from the start, and that’s the default setting for a website.
James Royal-Lawson
Yeah, design esthetics. I mean, yes, you might have designed a dark themed website or a light themed website. And, yeah, fair enough. But just because you’ve designed a dark themed website doesn’t necessarily mean to say that it is Dark Mode.
Per Axbom
Exactly. And this is what I think, what I mean when I say,I wasn’t, sure how long I’ve actually known about the fact that of Dark Mode being a user preference that can turn up in all these different contexts, in the operating system, in the browser and somewhere else as well, I think.
James Royal-Lawson
But I mean, what’s the point of Dark Mode, Per? Why? Why is this a thing?
Per Axbom
Well, when you listen to people, because you hear a lot of people these days saying they prefer Dark Mode, and when they say they prefer it, they say it’s easier on the eyes. There’s less eye strain, which would sort of make me allude to because I think a lot about accessibility. I think, well, that’s a good thing.
Then probably, if they feel better reading that, that’s great. But then you start thinking, Well, how much should I take into account how people feel when they read my website? And is there any science behind this? Because some people just say it looks better. They love it. They love the way that it looks. Now, there are some other things that people bring up as well, like battery savings and stuff like that.
James Royal-Lawson
Yeah, the battery saving, like I said that, that’s something I recognize from from my telephone, that it kicks into Dark Mode automatically when the battery is low. And that does actually save power if it’s a certain type of screen.
Per Axbom
It has to be an OLED screen, right?
James Royal-Lawson
Yeah, yeah. And that’s something I think, I maybe didn’t really think about that, you know, when we sat here at desktop, on desktop machines, generally, they’re LED screens with backlights. So if you, if you take a monitor apart, often it’s like a it’s a string of LED lights that are behind the screen that shine light through the pixels to make the light up. Whereas the OLED screens, which are nowadays pretty much all your telephones, are those ones, at least the ones that have been manufactured in the last half decade, they have little lights in each pixel…
Per Axbom
Right, exactly.
James Royal-Lawson
So it’s not backlit in the same way. So when you make them shine less, you are saving power across the whole thing.Whereas on an old LED screen, or all backlit ones, then the lights on.
Per Axbom
But from what I understand, based on the research as well, it’s really the strength of your the brightness of your screen, that is the most important thing. So you can have full brightness and the Dark Mode, but light mode, but with less brightness on your screen, and less brightness on the screen generally means you’re using less power.
James Royal-Lawson
Yeah, I read that if the most saving you could have on your battery is by running Dark Mode in bright sunshine. Oh, interesting. So you’ve got Ultra brightness, so the screen goes bright because it’s sunny outside or whatever. So you save most battery by putting in dark mode, in the brightest conditions.
Per Axbom
Ah, the difference that you’re saying, Oh, that’s so interesting. How much power can I save?
James Royal-Lawson
No idea if it’s as good. I don’t know what kind of benefit over than that is.
Per Axbom
Best thing you can do is to turn off your phone.
James Royal-Lawson
Adding flight mode or turning it off if you’re really, really, really at a critical level of battery, yeah. But I mean, is there anything else that’s that’s useful with Dark Mode.
Per Axbom
Well, I was alluding to accessibility, I guess.
James Royal-Lawson
Accessibility, yes. And I think, to be honest, that’s where we’ve come from for this topic episode, accessibility. And what’s happening right now in Europe there’s a law coming. Well, there’s been a directive, the Accessibility Directive that is due to be put into force by all the member countries in June 2025, and by and large, the Accessibility Directive, it covers quite a lot of areas, industries, and it covers more than just web. It covers products and terminals and customer support and so on.
But from a web and app perspective, the European accessibility directive basically enshrines WCAG into itself, so you have to adhere to it. The European standard if you want to know the numbers of these things, and this is important to remember, EN 301549, wonderfully snappy name. It kind of beats WCAG, 2.1 or 2.2 hands over feet, I think. But that standard is what we need to follow in many, many situations now, in European countries, or in companies and organizations that have something to do with Europe effectively. So I think, from a designer point of view, we’re getting to the point now where in a lot, a lot of situations, you can’t duck accessibility, you can’t not have knowledge about what it means in your work.
Per Axbom
Oh, that’s definitely true. I wish it had been true for longer than that, but you’re absolutely right. And also, I hear it so much more in conversation. People are aware of it because these laws are coming. Yeah, that’s a good thing.
James Royal-Lawson
Legal departments are concerned about it, and that helps. But one thing in particular when it comes to dark mode, the European standard doesn’t actually specifically say you have to implement dark mode now. But what it does have is, is something a section called 11.7.
What I think is really interesting about 11.7 user preferences is, this is something which isn’t part of WCAG. And you know, by and large, from the web point of view, everything we need to care about is just in that standard, the international standard, but 11.7 user preferences is something that the EU has added on top of that. And that gets me, that gets me really interested. Because, of course, this is now additional. This is a new thing and a broader thing, 11.7 user preferences. Now, what that means? I think I said to you, Per before we started recording, it’s effectively an infinity pit, which sounds really kind of brutal. But what you need to do as part of that, part of the standard is adhere to user’s preferences,
Per Axbom
Follow the values of the user preferences for platform settings for colon and a list : units of measurement, color, contrast, font type, font size and focus cursor.
James Royal-Lawson
So what this means to us is, when we’re designing websites and apps, it’s not a question of offering something. This is a question of respecting something.
Per Axbom
I love this because you said this to me before we recorded. It’s like, it’s so weird. Well, okay, I don’t have to actually give the user a choice. I just have to implement it to make sure it’s there.
James Royal-Lawson
Yeah, which is, really interesting, Dark Mode. You don’t have to offer dark mode, but if you can sense, you can read this through the web browser. If you can sense or read that a user would prefer dark mode or prefer light mode, then you have to respect that choice.
Per Axbom
Okay, so this actually creates somewhat of a conflict for me in my reasoning, because the person may not be aware of the setting like I I’ve sort of not. I’m sort of not aware for some apps. Why is it dark? Why is it light? Sometimes I just don’t care. I don’t hunt for the setting, but people are not always aware of the setting, and sometimes they do want to have it different for different interfaces, because it makes sense to them, or because the website has implemented something poorly. So they would want the choice, but I don’t have to give it.
James Royal-Lawson
But at the same time, if you feel like that, Per, then I think absolutely that sounds like a good argument for you offering the choice as well as respecting the choice. So there’s absolutely nothing in this standard that says you can’t actually actively offer a choice of Dark Mode to users that visit your site, but you do still have to, at least in the first instance, respect their inherited choice from their platform. You can even override it, but you can, you need to respect the underlying one.
Yeah, when I said about this being like an infinity hole, it kind of is usability. You listed some of the things that you need to respect, but from from a web perspective, this is a lot of stuff I need to respect, and when you’re talking about not just of color preferences, light mode, dark mode, contrast, high contrast, low contrast, the font that’s been used, although that, I don’t think you can actually do much about when you’re in a Web page, it’s just going to be overridden. But font size, there’s also something that you need to respect. Gone are the days where you can use fixed number of pixels for anything text. You can’t do it anymore. It’s not going to be compliant.
Per Axbom
And sometimes when you dive into what these preferences really mean, I was surprised when I saw that for like, if you say you prefer a contrast of high or more as the setting is, you can also have a custom setting, which means the user can notify the system, about using a specific set of colors, and the contrast implied by these colors have to match either more or less. It’s just like so difficult. There’s no, no way of testing that, for all the all the possible variations.
James Royal-Lawson
Exactly Per that’s one of the things I think, that’s challenging with this is that the European law is very broad, and what’s required is that the authorities, the national authorities for each European country, will have to state what the local adaptation of this law means in their instance. So that gives you some kind of way of narrowing down what you need to test and what you need to focus on to be compliant with this. Because, yeah, we can have the overall ambition of honoring all user preferences, but it’s just infeasible to test and it’s just gonna eat you alive.
Per Axbom
But you still have to do something.
James Royal-Lawson
Yeah, and that is where Dark Mode comes into it, because Dark Mode is going to be one of those things that I think many countries do actually officially state it’s something you need to do. I mean, I’ve been discussing the possibility that we should honor prefers reduced motion as well, for example. But that’s not yet been something I’ve seen mentioned too many times in in various conversations about this. But I still would encourage people, they’re doing websites, to look at that.
Per Axbom
Certainly, I think the reason people don’t talk about is because there’s not that many websites with that much motion and animation, but the ones that do have it, I really would like that setting myself.
James Royal-Lawson
Well, I just think one of the things that often pops up is, you know, we’re using transitions more and more and more on stuff we do and small animations. Many websites have some kind of loading indicator for something. These things with some kind of degree of motion do actually appear. So, yeah, I’d encourage people to think about reduced and prefers reduced motion. But Dark Mode, this is where I think it’s the big win for accessibility and and us as designers, where we need to really put some effort into understanding what can be done and what should be done.
Per Axbom
It’s funny, because when you read up on this, and people have realized, oh, we need a dark mode. You see all these it’s almost like always the case when you talk about accessibility, oh, we want a quick fix. Please give me a quick fix. And people say, Well, I have this, like CSS that you can apply, and it’s only seven lines of code, and you’re done here, you can have it. And of course, unfortunately, it’s not that easy.
James Royal-Lawson
Well, you say that, but to be honest about I think in some situations, you might well get you might well make quite a bit of difference just by doing that.
Per Axbom
I would agree, but it’s not. You can’t do that without testing. So that’s where, actually, where it comes, what comes down to so it depends on context.
James Royal-Lawson
Again, I’m hearing you,
James Royal-Lawson
But you’re not agreeing with me.
James Royal-Lawson
But I’m not going to respect your preferences on this. No thinking here is like this in Chrome. Anyway, there’s an experimental feature which is basically forced dark mode. So you can go into the flags in Chrome and you can tell it to apply dark mode to web pages. And that you don’t have much choice about as a website, because you don’t know it’s been done. It’s just going to be, it’s going to be done to your page anyway, yeah, without testing. So when there’s that kind of experimental feature, and people do have plugins for this as well. I mean, if you read up about Ultimate Dark Mode.
Per Axbom
Right, so the user themselves is completely responsible for that, now I’m gonna go in and change everything, then, of course, then it’s up to them.
James Royal-Lawson
Yeah. So, if you haven’t, got the means and ability to do a very thoughtful dark mode, or you don’t have time to kind of go into all your components, dig down into your design system, and your backlog is already two years long, it’s going to be impossible. Then maybe you could look into some of these quick solutions. I mean, I found one that was one line.
Per Axbom
I know you sent that to me. It’s, yeah, which was actually quite impressive.
James Royal-Lawson
I’ve actually tested it on my website and I was actually quite, I was quite impressed. It didn’t, I’ve got some stuff on mine that’s not accessible anyway, contrast wise, which I’d need to get around to fixing, my backlog is also long. But this was just where you when you took the HTML tag for a web page and in CSS, you added a filter to that, a filter that was invert one.
Per Axbom
Very simple. It’s very simple,
James Royal-Lawson
And it was remarkably good, even even does some of the images as well.
Per Axbom
Yeah, but specifically for images, what it did is, actually, it makes the image look like a negative.
James Royal-Lawson
Yeah, the filter is an invert. So it’s iterally inverted,
Per Axbom
Yeah, exactly. That’s probably where a designer would would say, No, sir, that’s not going to work for me.
James Royal-Lawson
Yes, I’d probably, I’d probably want to do some more CSS that stopped it from doing it to the images, but as a brutal one line solution that was surprisingly good.
Per Axbom
The brutal Dark Mode, I like that.
James Royal-Lawson
The brutal Dark Mode, the quick and dirty Dark Mode, but it’s not a good long term solution that one, because it doesn’t involve any thought. So though there will be things that aren’t going to work and things that, as a designer, you’re going to be unhappy about. I know one of the one of the things about Dark Mode that comes up is it’s quite normal that we use shadowing and layers to create depth in designs, and you do that through gray panels, basically, or translucent panels. When you when you invert that with a dark base, then it doesn’t quite work as well.
Per Axbom
I mean, yeah, exactly shadow. You don’t want the shadow to be lighter than the background. It just looks weird. So the recommendation is actually just, if you want layers or shadows, you still have to fix it so that the darkest color is the one that has the furthest behind the field of vision.
James Royal-Lawson
Yeah. You will need to alter your your depth of color, I guess so that it does work on on that scale, and it doesn’t quite work just by inverting. So that’s a good example of where they my HTML filter, invert one, does fall over a bit because it’s not going to give you the feeling that you would like maybe from…
Per Axbom
And there’s other example is the website logo is usually in a color. So it’s that’s like the same for images, but I was thinking specifically of photos before. But if you have like a graphic that is your logo, you probably want to do something to it to make sure it works in both light and dark. I mean, it’s perfectly possible, of course, to change out the logo depend with your style sheet, but it’s also possible, depending on where the dark mode setting is changed, maybe the CSS doesn’t even detect it, like you were saying you set the dark mode in the browser, like hard coded in there. I thought that’s something I actually am going to try out myself to design my logo in a way that it actually works for both modes.
Per Axbom
Well, I’ve seen that over the years from in kind of corporate style guides and branding guides that they they do have logos designed for light and dark backgrounds, right? It’s not, it’s not unusual to see that.
Per Axbom
But to change it yourself, you have to be aware of the user setting, and that’s not always the case,
James Royal-Lawson
But here’s good point now for us to get into the practical side of how you deal with this. Because, I mean, you’re thinking about it whe I’ve seen so many people have figma designs and figma files for designs now, it’s not that common for me to see a dark mode design presented?
Per Axbom
Oh, I completely agree.
James Royal-Lawson
I mean, it’s of course, nowadays I’m going to expect a mobile version to be presented. I’d kind of like to see that presented first, in many situations, even though more often than not, it’s still desktop ones get presented first. Dark Mode, is something I just don’t see, which implies that people are not putting the time from like the beginning to think about how this would work.
Per Axbom
Oh, and then is that when, if you have time, I’m going to get into technical things now, again, because you and I, you were mentioning Figma, and you and I probably don’t work as much in Figma as most other designers, and love to design prototypes, because you can actually understand how it works. In that case, the code you mentioned before, just one line of code is a perfect way of just testing. What are the things I need to start thinking about? So in a prototype setting, I really support the use of short CSS, like code snippets to just test well what’s going to change. What do I need to think about, and from that design your Dark Mode?
James Royal-Lawson
Yeah. They’re actually quite, I suppose, a number of ways you can deal with this. I’m not completely on top of how you do it in Figma, but from what I’ve understood, you can make use of variables in Figma to allow light and dark modes, you create some color variables, and then you create aliases of design tokens, and then you would switch. You assign your Dark Modes, assign tokens to a mode, and then you would it would switch which set you’re using from your layers. I’m saying this because I don’t really know exactly what you do, because I never tried it.
Per Axbom
It makes no sense to me to do it there.
James Royal-Lawson
I know, but basically, there seems to be ways you can deal with variables in Figma to actually make it possible to switch between variants. Which made me think about how, you know, that’s kind of that feels like it’s on the right lines. Because how you would potentially do this on a website in a way which I think is more efficient, is you would add color scheme in CSS to your pages, and with color scheme, you can say, oh, light and dark. And then when you go on to defining, say, like, I don’t know, a color of a button, you would actually list both colors. So you would, you would list them both so that it, oh, you can actually automatically, you’d put them in the same place. You wouldn’t have to do a media query in two separate sets of CSS. So they’ve got, no, here’s the CSS for dark mode. Here’s the CSS for mobile dark mode. So you’ve got 9, 8, 9, 10 different sets of CSS. You actually bake it together. So you say, hey, look, this is still my CSS for this width, but in every definition, I’m giving you the two variants that you need, to cope with it.
James Royal-Lawson
Yeah, you’re essentially using variables in CSS as well.
James Royal-Lawson
It’s effectively the same thing, yeah, just structure slightly differently, but that that cuts down your work. I mean, as a designer, I mean, this is just then something you’re just specifying for the component, you know, it’s decide one supply everywhere, pretty much just like it would be if you’re deciding that the button’s blue and that the button is going to have this blue on hover, this blue and active. You know, then you’ve done those three, four variations of the button and make sure they work. You just do it at the same time you do the other ones. I’m making it sound very easy to design a button, and we all know it’s not always easy to design a button.
Per Axbom
And sometimes it may make more sense to actually do the inversion by calculations rather than specific colors, because then it would be easier if you change one color, then you don’t have to find the corresponding dark mode color, because it’s calculated according to some predetermined formula that everyone is agreeing on.
James Royal-Lawson
Possibly, I think though the variables is probably a safer way of doing that because of tokens and variables, at least then it’s more transparent, because, as me and you talked about, affected the whole thing of algorithms, that often it hides complexity under the surface, so you don’t understand what’s happening. The advantage of tokens and variables is that it’s visible, that you can actually see the chain you see what’s happening a more more comprehensible, perhaps than than a formula,
Per Axbom
Then I’d have to encourage designers as well to to use Dark Mode more as well, to just get into the understanding of what are the things that can go wrong, what looks weird, what contrast issues can there be, to get like this feeling and experience of what goes wrong when we use Dark Mode across the web. So use set Dark Mode for a week. That would be my challenge after listening to this episode on your desktop.
James Royal-Lawson
Actually, Per one thing that I’ve had for years now is, I I’ve got pretty much every web browser that I can install, installed. So in one of them, I have it set to prefers Dark Mode.
Per Axbom
Excellent suggestion.
James Royal-Lawson
So this means that, if I want to test something, then I’ll just open up that web browser and just move the URL across, and there I can see it in in Dark Mode. And that’s been really useful and really good. And just like you say about I sometimes forget about whether sites have it or not, because you kind of used to certain ones seeing them all the time in dark mode or not. But that’s one of my tips. Have a browser that you have set to Dark Mode.
Per Axbom
And then it becomes interesting, because what you were saying before about 11.7 is that it also, if a user preference is high contrast, then we maybe need a third option or a third design.
James Royal-Lawson
Or not. Because, I mean, I’m not exactly sure what high contrast means from a legal, from the standards point of view. I’m going to make a guess that it’s the triple A level of WCAG. Which is she’s fantastic. If that’s the case, then we’ve we’ve suddenly, in Europe, got a situation where we’re, by and large, following WCAG, 2.1 well actually kind of 2.2 plus 11.7 in the form of things like high contrast, which means you’re pulling in the triple A high contrast from WCAG, 2.2 But you can only you could just, just go for triple A in the first place, just from a complexity point of view, if you want to keep it more simple then, don’t worry about high contrast. Yeah, I think this is okay to say, just go for triple A in the first place.
Per Axbom
But then there’s also a user preference that says less contrast. So don’t forget about that, and that’s sort of what I meant before with websites. Also they start designing in Dark Mode. That doesn’t mean that that’s the only one you have to offer. If you design your website by default in Dark Mode, you also have to have light mode CSS.
James Royal-Lawson
I think, what’s beautiful about this Per is, you know, going back, what is it now? It’s rapidly approaching. Was it 14, 15, years since we had responsive web make its appearance? The whole thing with user preferences and viewports and responsive web, we really are getting to that point now where we as designers really need to let go and we need to adopt a fully fluid way of working.
I mean, sure, design systems have also nudged us in that direction, but design systems and their components are very kind of like their boxes, you know, they have their ins and outs. You put that into it, you get that out of it, whereas what we’re talking about now and what you’re mentioning with high contrast, low contrast, dark mode, light mode, increased font size, reduced motion, small viewport zoomed. All of these things are variables. All of these things can be combined as a designer, the days where I can say 100 pixels wide white, you know I mean, I mean the days where you can specify in a way which is concrete, is gone.
Per Axbom
And you need to embrace that and think of it as a good thing. That’s the challenge, isn’t it? Yeah, it’s because it’s lovely. That’s what I love about HTML. It’s so adaptable.
James Royal-Lawson
It’s so robust. And yes, it causes a lot of problems with the fact it’s so robust, but at the same time, you know, just diving straight into this and embracing a world that is fluid and that your design needs to be robust and it needs to cope with larger font sizes, with high contrast, different colors, all these things we’ve listed, your design needs to not break, just like we’ve talked about how with mobile, your mobile viewport design needs to not break. Desktop one not break. We’re just making sure things don’t break.
Per Axbom
It’s beautiful, yeah.
James Royal-Lawson
How hard can it be?
Per Axbom
So what should people listen to next, James?
James Royal-Lawson
Episode 235 from series one, which is Internet Anxiety with David Swallow.
Per Axbom
Oh, that. I don’t remember all of that, but that was probably a very interesting episode.
James Royal-Lawson
It was, I mean, David works a huge amount with accessibility and what we talk about in that episode, amongst many other interesting things, we talk about the prefers CSS, pseudo properties, and also suggest, David actually says that the suggestion that we should have prefers reduced anxiety.
Per Axbom
Oh, that would be wonderful.
James Royal-Lawson
It’s a wonderful thing. And if you combine that now with the law we just talked about having to respect that preference would be a wonderful thing.
Per Axbom
Yes.
James Royal-Lawson
So dig that episode out or click on the activate the link.
Per Axbom
Prefers, no dark patterns, prefers, oh, and there are so many things to just, not prefer.
James Royal-Lawson
Well, not prefer,or prefer. But you can listen to that, and I recommend you do. It’s healthy listening.
Per Axbom
Remember to keep moving.
James Royal-Lawson
See you on the other side.
[Music]
James Royal-Lawson
Alright, Per. So why do programmers prefer Dark Mode?
Per Axbom
Actually want to think about this, but yeah, I don’t know. James, why do programmers prefer Dark Mode?
James Royal-Lawson
Because light attracts bugs.
This is a transcript of a conversation between James Royal-Lawson, Per Axbom recorded in December 2024 and published as episode 329 of UX Podcast.