Many of the clients that we worked with at Retail Pro wanted to see their own brand in the POS software they were using. We helped them manage this with custom css code that was very time consuming for devs to implement. Updates to Retail Pro's software would also break these changes which would further strain dev's resources with every new release.
After learning about this problem I started to meet with developers to see if there could be a way to allow our clients to customize parts of the UI. I also met with SMEs to see what kinds of UI changes people typically made.
Once it became clear that the number of changes people usually made were low and that dev was able to customize most of them in the UI, I then started to explore what that customization would look like.
I started prototyping some concepts and shared them with developers and SMEs. We found that the CSS changes were very easy to implement but structural changes to the UI would be a larger effort.
Finally, we landed on the four variables we would customize for our MVP: the primary color, the secondary color, the background image and the company logo.
Once this customization was implemented it greatly reduced the number of dev hours needed for CSS customization. It also made new release to our software much smoother for our customers.