Square Credit Card End-to-End Experience Optimization
Heuristic Evaluation, In-Depth Interviews | End-to-End Journey | Impact: Roadmap, 3% Sign-Up
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.
I led in-depth interviews and cognitive walkthroughs of the current product experience to identify evolving user needs and expectations, pain points, and product and marketing gaps from key and net-new segments. My goal: to build an experience that sustainably increases engagement and maintains consistent spend as the product enters its growth stage.
Quick & Scrappy Research in Tandem with a Structured and Deliberate Approach
Background & Objective
The cross-functional credit card team wanted to investigate pain points within the current acquisition funnel and product experience to understand future opportunities to drive measurable impact for the business. 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.
Past research had already supported a baseline understanding of what users expected from a credit card but the team needed additional research support to breathe life back into their charter and refine its roadmap. 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.
Methodology
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.
Findings
All usability issues identified during the evaluation were documented in a detailed spreadsheet and synthesized in a follow-up report highlighting the most critical pain points. Each issue was tagged by severity level and mapped to the Nielsen Norman heuristics, giving the team a clear, prioritized view of opportunities for improvement. This structure also enabled Product and Engineering to make informed trade-offs based on effort and impact.
I also moderated interviews from four distinct behavioral cohorts. Every session was remote and stakeholders were invited to each session to take notes and ask follow-up questions based on the nature of our discussion. Notes and interviews were aggragated within Dovetail, and findings synthesized with its AI tooling. I created a top-level findings report as well as a detailed end-to-end mapping of the users’ experience, documenting pain points, needs, and gaps in our product offering, including videos, screengrabs, and quotes to enhance the human element of our reporting. These artifacts were used by product, design, and marketing decision makers.
Key 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
My recommendations focused on the biggest areas of opportunity and “low hanging fruit” fixes that could create outsized impact:
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.
Adopt Square’s debit card onboarding and activation flow to credit card to include QR activation, SPOS delivery notifications and status updates.
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 accounts.
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.