One theme framework, eight Help Center launches

The problem

Upwork's Help Center is the self-service front door for a support operation of 300+ agents and around 600,000 tickets a year. Stakeholders brought new feature ideas constantly. The standard Zendesk theme package kept everything in one JavaScript file and one CSS file, which got harder to read with every change, and image storage was limited.

Upwork's public Help Center on Zendesk Guide, January 2024 — Upwork's public Help Center, January 2024 (Internet Archive capture). Design © Upwork.

What I built

A modular theme framework. Components maintained separately, compiled into Zendesk's theme format with Gulp and webpack, with images hosted on AWS S3.
Deploys through CI/CD. When Zendesk released the Themes API, the framework moved to automated deployment.
Eight redesign launches, from August 2017 to January 2024.
An Enterprise Help Center on the same Zendesk instance and brand. A separate instance would have split ticket history and duplicated the articles every user shares.
An incident-aware contact flow. During incidents, people contact support before checking the status page. I wired the Status API into the contact flow, so users see an active incident before they open a ticket.

I built the framework as an engineer and later led the team that owned the Help Center, including the account-type navigation for freelancers, agencies, clients and enterprise teams.

Diagram: modular theme components compiled with Gulp and webpack, deployed through the Themes API, across eight launches — The framework behind eight redesign launches.

Upwork's public Enterprise Help Center, January 2024 — Upwork's Enterprise Help Center, same instance and brand, January 2024. Design © Upwork.

What changed

Across eight launches, the Help Center scaled to serve millions of users while remaining maintainable for a lean team.

"Asif was instrumental in transforming our Help Center into a highly effective resource for our users. He not only integrated our internal systems seamlessly but also redesigned the site to be much more user-friendly. His efforts didn’t just make the Help Center more accessible; they also led to a significant increase in our self-service rate, boosting it from 80% to an impressive 96%."

— Joe Wang, Director of Engineering / Manager, Upwork

"Asif led the engineering side of our Help Center with a calm and methodical approach that made even the toughest projects feel manageable. He transformed the Help Center into a powerful resource for users, ensuring it met our needs with precision and care."

— Ana Cosovic, Customer Experience Partner, Upwork

What I took from it

A Help Center outlives every redesign. The build system is what decides whether the eighth redesign is as cheap as the first.