In Q2 of 2020, Square announced a program called Reserves to higher-risk sellers to allow more business owners to use the platform. Reserves hold a percentage (15-30%) of each transaction for a specified period of time (30-90 days), placing a significant burden on sellers with a reserve. Since its release, Reserves have had mixed feelings in the media and from sellers, creating confusion and tension. In Q3 of 2021, I joined the Risk Design Team at Square to design and implement a more comforting and user-friendly dashboard for sellers.

Our approach was to give sellers a complete understanding of where their money was and when they would receive it. Upon joining the team, we already had two clear feature priorities:
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01. Add a list of upcoming releases.
02. Improve how we show the current reserve terms.

In addition to improving the dashboard, we took a broader look at the Reserves experience, improving how sellers receive news about a reserve on their account and how users navigate to the dashboard.

My first goal was to clearly convey when a seller would receive money back into their account. Feedback from sellers was they didn’t understand when they would receive money from a reserve or how much they would be receiving, causing stress about having their money in time for bills and payroll.

I wanted to make release information glanceable and allow sellers to relate an upcoming release to their financial calendar, so I experimented with designs showcasing releases in a calendar view. User testing with coworkers unfamiliar with reserves showed this to be a promising solution, but after talking with engineering, we realized this would be a high-cost design to implement. I wanted to keep the date aspect of the calendar, so I provided meta information showing sellers the date of the release in addition to how many days away the release is. I also created a section at the top of the dashboard telling sellers how much money would be released tomorrow, over the next seven days, and over the next 30 days.

Square was also looking to expand on the existing Reserves system by creating a variable version called Tiered Reserves. This new Tiered Reserves System added 1-2 selling limits where your reserves change, so a seller’s reserve terms would change as they progressed throughout the month, quarter, or year - depending on their terms. Our new dashboard needed to include these extra variables and show the reset schedule for your tiers, the limits where your reserves change, and 1-2 additional reserve percentages.

I tried several data visualization methods to make this complex system glanceable and understandable. Most importantly, I wanted the user to quickly see which tier they were currently in and how close they were to the next tier. Using that to determine my hierarchy, I emphasized the current terms while using a stepper to show any past or following tiers.

Through user testing, I identified the first email a seller receives as a critical touchpoint in the reserves experience. At the time, the email didn’t give context into why money was now being held, didn’t highlight the seller’s reserve details, when the reserve would start, and didn’t call out that this was an important change to their account. Sellers would often miss this email, resulting in noticing their first hold after a transaction with a reserve, leading to confusion and anger. To promote better sentiment and understanding, I worked with Laurah Mwieichia, the team’s copywriter, to improve the language of this email. We improved the information hierarchy to call out only the most important information, such as the reserve details and when it would come into effect. For the times where the user still misses the email, we added a card to the reserves dashboard with FAQs and a link to learn more about reserves.

In the three months I was at Square, I was able to onboard quickly and jump into designing a new and improved dashboard. I advocated for sellers, pushing clear and empathetic designs to help them understand why this account change was happening. Through user testing, I looked at the larger user journey, identifying additional areas to improve our communication to help sellers. New emails were designed to explain what was happening and lead them directly into their reserves dashboard, where they had quick access to FAQs and help centers.