I talk a lot about how “empathy” in commercial UX is mostly a posture because in reality capitalism doesn’t care, but it’s important to consider the additional problem of people in charge who are too shallow to be capable of understanding “why” some people prefer, or need, to do things differently than they do.
This one time I was telling the ceo/founder of a startup I worked for that our react app was making my new macbook pro crawl and we need to fix that because it was a b2b product that would be used by people in finance offices decked out with dell opticrap machines. He responded with surprise “wow, steve. you really care about people don’t you?”
I was kinda floored. Anyway, here we are…
https://web.archive.org/web/20230727121010/https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1684491212219359232
nothing wrong with not having one. Having one and removing it because you like the dark mode better, on the other hand? He’s been told that every design decision has to consider light and dark. Just like he’s going to be told that the web app requires more dev resources for browser compatibility testing, accessibility, performance etc and more design resources for responsiveness and stuff like mouse vs touch.
If he drops light mode he can cut more staff for sure. If he drops web, he can cut even more. He will do it.
but anyway, light mode/dark mode are a great example of corps doing something good in the bare minimum way. Before apple or whoever branded black backgrounds and white text as “dark mode” implementing an alternative UI theme based on accessibility concerns on a major web app would have been impossible to get approved.
You guys are speaking in the sense that he wants to keep Twitter as is, but consensus is that he wants to create a super app from Twitter, so the developers will need to design and redesign a lot of what is currently done. If you remove a light scheme from the equation and just develop everything for dark mode development (design, coding, etc) will be faster.
I’m speaking in the sense that he’s a desperate idiot trying to make twitter cost him as little as possible. He’s walking around that hell hole asking for ideas on cutting costs.
For sure he wants it to be profitable ASAP. Cutting development costs will help on that.
Not scaring off advertisers with fascism could also work.
but fascism is a core functionality!