Next Experience UI Dark Theme (San Diego)

Mark Roethof · ‎02-03-2022

Articles, Blogs, Videos, Podcasts, Share projects - Experiences from the field

Hi there,

Seen the new Next Experience UI yet? A "next generation, intuitive, personalized experience to drive productivity, improve engagement, and surface insights across the Now Platform." It will take a bit to get used to, though it's definitely a nice stap forward!

Playing around on my Personal Developer Instance, I came across something new with the Next Experience UI. Ok, it's not shocking, though let's just share... an out-of-the-box Dark Theme!

Out-of-the-box look

The out-of-the-box homepage on a San Diego instance with Next Experience UI enabled, looks something like below.

Enable Theme preference

Pre-San Diego / Next Experience, we are used to changing a Theme through the user settings. On a fresh San Diego instance, you'll notice that Theme is not an option under the Preferences. So how do we get our hands on the Dark Theme?

01.
Update System Property "glide.ui.polaris.dark_themes_enabled", update the value to "true".

02.
Refresh your browser, top right click on your User icon and select "Preferences" from the menu.

03.
"Theme" should now be visible to select. On the next screen shown you can select the Dark Theme.

Result

After refreshing your browser, the homepage looks something like below.

---

And that's it. Hope you like it. If any questions or remarks, let me know!

C	If this content helped you, I would appreciate it if you hit bookmark or mark it as helpful. Interested in more Articles, Blogs, Videos, Podcasts, Share projects I shared/participated in? - Articles, Blogs, Videos, Podcasts, Share projects - Experiences from the field

Kind regards,

Mark Roethof

ServiceNow Technical Platform Architect @ Eraneous

3x ServiceNow Developer MVP

3x ServiceNow Community MVP

---

Jonah Piascik · ‎02-03-2022

Nice! When will San Diego and Next UI be available for upgrade in our PDI? Is there an ability to create our own themes for Next? Can you toggle between Next and UI 16, or is Next an automatic change?

Mark Roethof · ‎02-03-2022

Hi Jonah,

It's available since yesterday on PDI's.

On new instances, Next Experience is automatically enabled. On upgraded instances, you can make that choice yourself.

Kind regards,
Mark

Muralidharan BS · ‎02-03-2022

Wow, it looks classy!

Jonah Piascik · ‎02-04-2022

Thanks Mark - I'll try again today. Yesterday I didn't see an option to upgrade to SD, but maybe I just needed to logout and back in.

UPDATE - Upgrade to SD EA available for PDI now. Thanks!

MateoBilandzija · ‎02-06-2022

Strange either im crazy or my switch still not works out. I enabled the dark Theme but it stays on Default any suggestions ?

Its constantly switches between white and dark

Mark Roethof · ‎02-07-2022

Not sure.

Have you tried fully logging of/on? Cache.do? Refresh browser?

Kind regards,
Mark

MateoBilandzija · ‎02-07-2022

Did everything - Strangly still refreshes first black the white again

Maik Skoddow · ‎02-07-2022

Hi @Mark Roethof

I also cannot change to dark theme and I also get that homepage inclusive the top banner you have in your screenshot. Can you please provide the exact URL?

Mark Roethof · ‎02-07-2022

Maybe it depends on where you are viewing this? For example it's not 100% compatible. Who knows futures patches 🙂

My homepage, works good:
https://your-instance.service-now.com/now/nav/ui/home

CMDB Workspace, works good:
https://your-instance.service-now.com/now/cmdb/home

Kind regards,
Mark

Maik Skoddow · ‎02-07-2022

Hi Mark

thank you, that was the missing URL I was looking for.

Maik

51 · ‎02-08-2022

Hi @Mark Roethof !

Will this dark theme-selection also apply to the Agent Workspace?

In the Rome release everything seems pretty much white in Agent Workspace after having chosen a darker theme in Classic view.

Most of our agents work with tickets through Agent Workspace, and a dark mode for this view is highly sought-after.

Thanks in advance for your answer! 🙂

Mark Roethof · ‎02-08-2022

Haven't looked at it closely yet, though just opening Agent Workspace with Dark mode enabled:

Kind regards,
Mark

Ashley Snyder · ‎02-10-2022

Dark theme will apply to Configurable Workspaces - workspaces that can be configured in UI Builder (introduced in Quebec), and will not apply to Agent Workspace.

Joseph43 · ‎02-15-2022

same issue here

Chaz Gordon1 · ‎03-30-2022

So this still has a glaring white background on everything the previous UI had, Forms, lists, dashboards, homepages? What gives???

Chaz Gordon1 · ‎03-30-2022

and now the text is lighter, so it's more of an accessibility issue than before

Ashley Snyder · ‎03-30-2022

Core UI (Platform) elements such as forms, lists, and dashboards cannot utilize dark mode as of the San Diego release, only UI Builder pages used in Landing Pages or Workspaces can utilize dark mode at this time.

Chaz Gordon1 · ‎03-30-2022

That's a real shame, all that stuff I listed is what we have always been asking for Dark Mode to cover, particularly as Admins.

I guess I will continue to utilise Dark Reader and have to switch back to white mode in Flow designer to see the branching.

Ashley Snyder · ‎03-30-2022

Thank you for the feedback Chaz, we have heard the need for this from other customers and it is being taken into consideration for the roadmap. We encourage customers to begin looking at Configurable Workspaces that can utilize dark theme for Tier 1/2 agents and have released Configurable Workspaces for most products as of the San Diego release. More information on dark mode, theming, and workspaces can be found on our Center of Excellence site.

Adrian Salone1 · ‎04-21-2022

Same deal here - multiple instances (a non-prod instance upgraded from Quebec to San Diego, and a fresh personal developer instance).

Enabled Dark theme, went to Preferences > Theme, selected Dark. No difference.

Logging a ticket with NowSupport. They can sort this out. Will submit their response here if it's appropriate.

UPDATE: a quick chat with some of my fellow devs has taught me that Dark mode doesn't apply to anything that is UI16. So forget about it for list views, incident forms, request forms, you know, all the stuff you currently use. It does work for the CMDB Workspace, so that's nice /s.

Jon G1 · ‎06-09-2022

Yeah, this is pretty frustrating. It's like they just wanted to be able to say they have a dark mode without putting the work in.

ServiceNow Marketing: Now includes a Dark Theme!*

*(Themes work exactly the same as they did before and our dark theme won't get rid of the glaring white backgrounds which are the reason you've been asking for a dark mode in the first place.)

Paul Curwen · ‎11-08-2022

So basically if your using UI16 standard lists, forms etc which 99% of customers still are then Dark mode is more like:

Jeff Lord · ‎11-08-2022

No it doesn't have to still be white.

Only the out of the box one is that way.

When you create your own you can do with it what you will. I have made my own theme in my PDI. This is a very dark version but just some tweaks can make it even better.

zotchy · ‎08-14-2023

I have a custom formatter that I want to be able to adopt to dark theme switch. How can I catch it from UI macro? I do no see any window objects that can help me here.