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I am originally from San Francisco, California.
I am bicycle obsessed. I find joy in all forms of cycling, and bike culture, and hope to always work towards getting more people on two wheels.
Darkmode is of significant benefit to a variety of different users within the Grubhub ecosystem. In July of 2019, Grubhub delivered well over 1.5 million orders between the hours of 8pm and 6am.
Supporting darkmode is of significant benefit to the couriers who deliver these orders. Around 87% of couriers who work for Grubhub work at night. For these workers, Darkmode is not just a luxury item, but a safety feature as they drive in the dark.
Building a well integrated dark UI into an already established light design system posed a number of unique issues. Much of the logic built into Grubhub relied on the contrast and mental models provided by a light UI.
For example, depth is displayed through shadows in light mode. Within dark mode, I developed an alternative system for showing contrast and depth.
Additionally, passing accessibility with our already established brand colours posed a major issue. Some fine tuning of background and interactive colours was required to work around this.
Working on Grubhub+ taught me a number of valuable lessons, specifically within the world of systems design. I grew accustomed to thinking of my work as being part of a larger ecosystem, and working out just how every change will impact all other parts of the app.
Additionally, I worked as the primary point of contact and decision maker for all things dark mode. Having this sense of ownership over a specific domain allowed me the opportunity to impact decisons that I may otherwise not have been able to interact with so early on in my career.