Leading design for Square payments

Design Director · 2017 – 2020

Building and leading the Payments design team

Square operates with a decentralized model where Design Directors – sitting on staff-level leadership teams – report directly to General Managers, each responsible for an organizational unit. As the Design Director on Payments, I built and led a team of 8 designers within an organization size of 300+.

Influencing Square Design

Designers share responsibilities to build the broader Square Design organization. My contributions included leading teams to define interviewing processes, employee onboarding, and best practices for conducting design sprints. Additionally, I became a top interviewer in 2019.

Fostering a healthy culture

To help influence the Payments orginizational culture, I led internal branding projects to create a recognizable identity. Additionally, time was dedicated to building and creating a tight-knit design team.

Designing an end-to-end Payments experience

The Payments Design team was responsible for onboarding sellers to accept payments, payments entry experiences, deposits & money management flows, and Square Card. Additionally, the team inherited Square's Help & Support and Risk product experiences.

Onboarding
Identity Verification
Payments
Deposits &
Square Card
Risk
Support

Localizing onboarding for everyone

Square is available in multiple locales. Designing onboarding experiences required localizing massive flows for each language – hundreds of screens in total.

Cross-collaborating to create seamless activation

The team worked with compliance and legal teams to make our IDV process seamless.

Working with multiple form factors to design Payments

Square is offered on a wide variety of devices, including custom hardware. Some designers worked with custom-built hardware and screens.

Square Card, a first class product

The Square Card design, led by Mac Cormier and Michael Tomkins from the Payments Design team, required navigating internal and external organizations, and involved collaborating with over 150 team members from design, product, marketing, legal, risk, compliance, and executives. The team received an SFDW award for Best in Fintech and has been editorially publicized globally.

Square Card marketing creative direction, animation, and illustration led by Square Marketing Design Team.

Square Payments user experience flows

The Payments Design Team was responsible for many platforms, locales, and surfaces – both digital and physical. Every flow was thoroughly designed to cover all edge cases in pixel-perfect detail.