/notes/ ·
Fifteen versions of the same screen
Last time I wrote about the message. This one is about what the customer actually experiences once they are inside the software.
Dashboards are the default answer and usually the wrong one. We have all got used to squiggles and gauges, but a chart you did not configure yourself is not information. It is stress. You look at it and your first thought is whether something is wrong, not what to do next.
Over eleven months I built more than fifteen versions of Selda's interface, each one visually better than the last, and most of them were still wrong.
Dark theme was one of those. It looks good and it is genuinely hard to get right: the moment you choose it you inherit a contrast problem on every screen. Offer dark as a choice and ship light as the default, especially when the thing you are asking someone to trust is new and still argued about. Trust is the constraint, not taste.
The version that works is rarely the one that photographs best.