Disciple · Chapter 08

Making every app colour customisable

A few colours were customisable. Most weren't. JTBD research made clear that full colour control wasn't a nice-to-have — it was fundamental to the brand independence customers were paying for.

Product designResearchEngineering collaboration

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The scene

Michael Harrower

Head of Product Design · Disciple

Disciple's core promise is that communities look and feel like their own app — not a white-labelled third-party product. Customers pay for the brand independence that comes with being in the App Store under their own name.

But when we looked at how much of the app was actually customisable, the picture was inconsistent. A handful of brand colours could be set in the dashboard. Everything else was locked to Disciple's defaults. For customers who cared about brand, this was a constant source of friction.

The problem

Customers could set a few brand colours. The rest of the app did what it wanted.

JTBD research consistently surfaced the same theme: customers hired Disciple to give them a professional, branded community that felt independent. Every place the app defaulted to Disciple's colour choices undermined that. The gap between what customers expected and what they could actually control was wider than we'd realised.

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Brand independence tied to customer JTBD

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Colour control vs customer expectation

The work

The project required mapping every colour in the app, understanding where they came from, and building a system that gave customers full control without breaking existing communities.

Phase 01

Audit & mapping

Before designing anything, we needed to understand the full scope. I worked with engineering to catalogue every colour in the app — backgrounds, text, borders, interactive states, icons — and trace where each one was set. The audit revealed hundreds of hardcoded values and a handful of partially-connected theming variables.

The outcome

100%

App surfaces colour-customisable

Customers could now control every colour across their app, making Disciple's brand independence promise genuinely deliverable.

What I learned

Audit before designing.

The mapping phase felt slow, but it prevented us from building a system on top of something we didn't understand. Every assumption we had about the scope turned out to be wrong.