Where did you get inspirations to make classic UX which 1000's of company accept discourse base theme and adoption?

Hey Discourse Community,
I’m really surprised and wondering how discourse UX/UI made it through until here. Let me clear, am not saying anything about the design quality. I’m asking from a individual business perspective where we usually make apps/web solution for clients as a SaaS product. And we will have have request and demand from clients to make adjustments here/there in the UI.

But if we see discourse, for long time, it was a decent classical theme + additional supported themes by community. And 1000’s of big companies use this for their community software.

How did this companies accepted the fact with less customisation on UI/UX?
Is it because the solution is not their main product?
… because the discourse has lot of integrations and gamifications?

I’m trying to learn something from discourse growth.

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I’m not quite clear on what you’re asking here, sorry!

Discourse gives you full access to all markup so you can customise the UI as much as you like.

We ship with the functional basics so that people can customise to suit. That flexibility is fundamental to our success.

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No worries @HAWK
I will try to enlarge if that’s clear my doubt. What I’m saying the platform doesn’t lack something but if you see your major clients, they simply use the base theme. They don’t go further.

From design perspective, you might have done something good, so they are happy with this template/theme.

The question: How do you decide from product management perspective what will be something that is suitable for all clients?

How do you identify what is suitable for everyone?

In physical world, people buy ikea chairs as it is, it is classical and simple. IKEA didn’t fall down in the business because of not offering colourful chairs.

I will take out this word may be as you said there is lot of markup customisation end clients can make.

Some sites are beautifully, extensively themed, like Blizzards or say, https://community.festingervault.com

I do wonder however, if once you add a logo and appropriate base colours to match branding, a redesign of the rest of the interface is lower priority because the thing most people care about is a nice, tidy and functional UI that works on touch devices and is clear to read.

Yes, you can spend $2k to $10k on intricate bespoke theming, but do you generally need to?

The base Light or Dark theme do 95% of what you need? The more important element is the actual content that is written?

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