A preview of the the employee setup experience. A screen depicts various profile fields, like name and email address, for Square sellers to fill out.

Employee setup

Square · 2023

Problem

Square had a long, complicated setup process for adding new employees to sellers’ teams. There were lots of opportunities to exit the setup flow, and that resulted in less than 30% of employees successfully making it through the funnel and logging in on Point of Sale—our ultimate measure of success. Our goal was to create a more streamlined setup process that would simplify the experience and, in turn, increase the setup completion rate.

Solution

Working with my PM and Data Science partners, we developed a four-part funnel we could use to analyze traffic flowing through the setup process. With insights from this, we took a two-pronged approach to prioritize the lowest converting stages. We redesigned the onboarding flow to minimize exit points, and then followed up with a series of smaller experiments to target the most problematic parts of the setup funnel.

These efforts resulted in a significant increase in sellers and employees completing the setup funnel. For a follow-up release, we further modernized the creation flow by making it more modular—allowing the experience to adapt based on what products the seller uses—and expanded the invitation methods sellers could use to include SMS rather than just email. As a result, we have seen the number of employees onboarding successfully increase even more.

A before and after animated GIF showing basic profile information in a dialog (before), and in a full screen experience (after).
A screen for managing a team member's job details, showing fields for primary job title (Cashier), pay type (Hourly), hourly rate, and an option to add another job, along with an overtime exemption toggle. A screen showing the access management interface for a team member named Ashley, with options to set team permissions or cashier permissions, and a button to add a permission set.
A review screen showing a checklist for managing a team member's profile, jobs, access, and optional payroll information, with a “Done” button at the top.
A team management screen displaying a list of team members on the left and details of a selected team member, Ashley Harris, on the right, including profile information and contact details.
A partial view of the scheduling interface, showing the schedule for the week of 01/20 to 01/26, with job assignments and gray cells for adding shifts.

Next up

About 25% of Square sellers used third-party scheduling products due to the lack of an in-house option. Read more about how I helped design a scheduling solution that keeps sellers in Square.