Company
Square
RolE
Product Designer
When
Q3 2021
Scope
Redesign and experimentation
Square Online's setup guide had seven steps you couldn't see without clicking through, so new sellers didn't know where to begin. Growth teams wanted to add more steps to raise feature visibility, which would have made it worse. Through card sorting and interviews about how sellers actually experienced setup, we found they drew a line we hadn't: setting up a business is a different job from growing one.
I cut setup to three key steps so it could be finished quickly and feel like progress, and moved everything else into a "grow your business" section that takes over the top of the dashboard once setup closes. I designed the layout so growth teams could keep adding actions there without burying a first-time seller.
We A/B tested the split against a single list of all seven steps, so the only thing that changed was how the tasks were grouped. The worry was that moving features like SEO out of setup would make them easier to ignore. Instead they got used more, and the rate of sellers making a first sale went up 22%.
