Does Your Product Actually Need Dark Mode?

Here’s a fantastic article that digs into whether or not digital products need dark mode or not. In my design system consulting work, it’s a topic that comes up a lot, and I always find myself asking follow-up questions to client teams and workshop attendees that ask about it. Have users been begging for it? Is this a hard requirement or more of a curiosity?  What’s driving this desire to provide dark mode?

Those questions are coming from a place of genuine curiosity, not skepticism. This article does a great job at poking at the trend and where that trend came from, and provides some great criteria to consider when thinking about going down the dark mode road.

I wrote in my post “dark mode” vs “inverted” that it’s likely certain UI components will need to handle an “inverted” (or what we’ve recently been calling “knockout”) use case, even if Official dark mode isn’t on the table.

Irrespective of whether a design system officially supports dark mode, it’s very likely certain components will need to be rendered on dark backgrounds. So an inverted convention may be in place even if true dark mode isn’t supported.