Square Credit Card End-to-End Experience Optimization
Approach: Heuristic Evaluation, In-Depth Interviews
Scope: End-to-End Journey
Impact: Roadmap, 3% Sign-Up
Challenge: Stagnant Roadmap, Stakeholder Alignment
New Tools: Used AI to Synthesize & Prototype with Stakeholders
Square aimed to increase eligibility of its credit card tenfold. When a user base scales in size, friction points amplify leading to risk to brand trust and eventual churn. The objective was to pinpoint key areas where the experience did not match expectations and provide clear, evidence-based recommendations to reduce friction and improve success rates.
My goals: to breathe life into the team’s roadmap and build an experience that sustainably increases engagement and maintains consistent spend as the product enters its growth stage.
Situation & Task
Our most recent CSAT survey was clear that the credit card did not support recurring and growing spend behaviors and the team was particularly interested in understanding how to incentivize those behaviors to encourage retention. The data team also shared drop-offs at several points in the sign-up flow.
I was tasked with investigating pain points within the current acquisition funnel and product experience to understand future opportunities to drive measurable impact for the business. As much as the scope seemed straightforward, I was faced with a broader challenge - a stagnant roadmap and misalignment from several key stakeholders.
Approach
Briefing & Alignment Sessions: Focused on creating shared ownership and buy-in through a series of exercises, ultimately preventing rework and producing actionable outcomes.
Literature Review: Reviewed and synthesized past research on feedback from our user base (both active and churned) regarding limits, rewards, and repayments to establish evaluation criteria as well as past team research into the credit card experience.
Heuristic Evaluation: Audited the end-to-end journey (mobile / desktop) with design partners and ranked issues discovered against a team-wide established UX severity scale and business impact scale.
In-Depth Interviews: Led remote qualitative interviews with users to gather detailed feedback on behaviors and perceptions that enable churn and retention.
Synthesis, Opportunity & Brainstorming Sessions: Engaged with stakeholders during and after each sprint, utilizing AI tools to synthesize findings and prototype design artifacts for broader comms needs.
Findings
Unfavorable Rewards Program Usability: Users were not aware of our long-standing rewards program and when probed, were generally confused on the program’s reward type, value, and redemption structure.
Lack of Clarity of Offering: Users applied for the card believing we offered certain features that we do not provide such as evolving limits and ability to build credit. Our acquisition pages indicate lack of clarity of our offerings, potentially misleading new customers.
No Incentivizing Growth Structure: Churned card users expected better benefits like increased limits when they exhibit good behaviors ie re-paying on time and churned..
Recommendations
Update our introduction and acquisition emails and onboarding experience to highlight our “Rewards Program”, “No Fees”, and “No Impact to Credit” at upfront and onboarding.
Improve usability of our rewards program by increasing awareness on various surfaces, provide choice in rewards and in redemption. to explain rewards structure and how to redeem with more integrated, flexible, and targeted awards.
Longer-term with sizable impact included: incentivizing good behavior with evolving limits (ability to request increased limits and revisiting limits underwriting strategy to include user growth) or encouraging users to repay with their Square Checking and Savings account.
Impact
After reviewing the areas of improvement, the Product team focused on improving the rewards program while the Marketing team refreshed language and reordered value props highlighting the rewards program on all acquisition touch-points.
There has been a positive correlation with increase spend and repayments with rewards redemption since the program’s refresh. With this first marketing refresh, the overall sign-up success improved by +3%, representing a better approach to targeting the correct user base within Square.
Reflections
This project reinforced how powerful a “small but strategic” heuristic audit can be in driving meaningful improvement. I leveraged existing analytics and a focused heuristic and saw a +3% lift in sign-ups.
Key takeaways for me:
The need for incentivizing good behavior: Building a structure that incentivizes good behaviors like on-time payments, integrating repayments within the ecosystem, builds long-lasting relationships with your user base and will attract new customers.
The importance of end-to-end journey mapping: I intentionally scoped the acquisition and onboarding funnels in this work because this is how we set up expectations with our users once they begin using the product. It highlighted that revisiting marketing comms is just as important for retention as is new features since we target more relevant audiences.
The value of scalable research deliverables: Framing issues by severity + business impact helped the Product & Engineering teams balance trade-offs and move quickly.
In hindsight, if I were to run this again I’d build in time for a brief usability validation of the recommended fixes before full rollout, this would help quantify which specific design changes delivered the lift.
Overall, this experience deepened my conviction that even “back-end” flows like sign-up, often overlooked, are critical moments in the user journey. Optimizing them not only reduces churn, but also builds trust and momentum for the broader product experience.