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APP • 2019
Dark Mode
Scope
Define visual language
Design assets
Design screens
Role
Product Design
Testing
Timeline
2 months
Platform
Mobile
Overview
The year is 2019, and OLED screens are increasingly becoming affordable. With the changes in screen technology, dark mode was making waves. Apps were adopting it and even mobiles OSes were making it easier for developers to build apps with a dark theme. As a service is in the entertainment industry, dark themes were commonplace. The idea of moving to a dark mode intrigued us. We wondered how could it affect the experience beyond the aesthetics and improve the streaming experience. As a business, we had to justify spending time on it beyond just ‘following the trend’.
Add dark mode to Wynk to match features that the leading apps provide and much demanded by our users too.
Keeping up with the times
With phones moving to OLED screens and OSes implementing dark natively, we want to give the users a choice on Wynk too
Flexibility to users
Documentation in progress
You've come here a bit early. Give it sometime to see the full documentation. Meanwhile, you can read at what this project was, see some pretty screens and the impact it made.
The caption for the image goes here
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Impact
The dark mode was a requested feature by a niche group with a loud voice. But turns out, it was a feature that was welcomed by all. The dark mode provided a richer browsing experience to our users which was evident by the stream time. It also brought a new and modern look to the app that our users absolutely loved. It was well worth the effort and another feature that lets us take the fight to the top dogs.
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Final Words
We designed a fresh Wynk Music with a dark theme for our 50 million users. We proudly carry this as another feather in our cap. iOS and Android both made it incredibly easy to adopt dark mode for our app. This was a swift exercise that had an easy closure. Moving forward, it will be important to make sure whatever we design, is designed for both modes. This surely increases the effort on the design-end and would need stricter quality control too. While Wynk now has both a light and dark theme, the design team has already started to flirt with the idea of completely shifting to dark mode. Let's see what the future holds.
Clean up rough edges
There are nooks and corners that we've missed in the initial exercise of making a dark theme. Those would need to be cleaned up. The artworks that we also design don't sit well in both the modes and could do with some intervention.
Design for both modes
A big task would be how to quickly hand off designs for both modes for upcoming projects. New components would need additional hours for refinement in both the theme.
Learnings from the project
Never having worked in such a large team, I did not know about the challenges that arise. Few months into the job, and I could see faults in the ways of working. What was a casual discussion with my manager about how we function turned into my first ever design ops project.
Working with code
Both iOS and Android offered easy to switch to dark mode. But this meant working within the allowances of each development tool. It was great to learn about these and watch hours worth of WWDC and Google I/O keynotes.
Accessibility for digital design
We got a fresh opportunity to make sure our new (half) colour palette was compliant with accessibility standards. It was great to learn about accessibility and make sure we meet the basic contrast ratio standards.
Building design tokens
Wynk's design and code was in dissonance. I worked with the developers to define a singular vocabulary for the colour tokens so we could adjust the colours easily in the future.
