Light theme should be default, dark theme should be optional.
Juan Carlos Marin
8 replies
While designing mobile apps, light theme should be default, dark theme should be optional, not forced. I understand there’s a lot of people that prefer dark themes by default but from usability standpoint give user the choice.
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Navin Peiris@navinpeiris
I think it might be better to default it to whatever theme the user has set on their system preferences and give them the option to select a different one if they really wanted to. From my previous experiences, it's been pretty rare that the user chooses the light theme if they've set their device theme to dark or vice-versa.
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@navinpeiris Absolutely true, the best practice should be to have a theme selection based on user system wide selection. Thanks for redirecting my initial statement to a much clear one.
In the past, I've defaulted to the user's iOS (in this case) settings to set a coloring theme. We've allowed users to set a specific app theme that takes priority over the device theme. Is this in alignment with what you're suggesting?
@blake_whittington Thats also great, if you are setting by default based on user system wide selection, but is a plus if also the user can select other colors.
So in settings there should be a theme selector like this:
- Default with system theme
- Light theme
- Dark theme
I also have seen apps that has an even wider spectrum of colors like light blue, sepia, dark green or dark blue, and that is fine, giving the user a choice is a great plus.
So why can't we give the same user the choice to choose a light theme by setting dark as default?
@uma_venugopal Sure, you can, if you ask the user in the onboarding, also if a user has a system preference to dark theme, you could set dark as default based on it.