SquareUp Savings: Powering Businesses Everywhere

• Fintech

• Case Study

• Design Ontologies

Square is a leading business technology platform that helps merchants sell anywhere, manage operations, and connect with customers—all through one integrated system.

Team Structure

Square sellers had no built-in way to save or manage their funds

To fill this gap, we designed Square’s first savings experience from the ground up, allowing sellers to save effortlessly within the same ecosystem they trust to run their businesses.

We began with in-depth competitive research and internal focus groups to guide our UX decisions.

Mental Model

By blending the Lean UX and Double Diamond approaches, I mapped out the mental model that shaped Square Savings. This process helped me bridge the gap between user goals, business objectives, and stakeholder expectations.

This was my research on design ontologies during my Master’s in HCI-SWE (pub. 2024)

UX Discovery & Information Architecture

Includes closed card sorting exercises, internal focus group sessions for UX validation, and design sprint planning artifacts that helped align designers, PMs, and stakeholders on user needs and product direction.

Early Sketches

The structure you see now may look obvious but it took what felt like a thousand iterations to get there. I was trying to arrange these blocks in a way that supported a clear mental model and a UI that felt intuitive and digestible.

These sketches were done on a plane. I ran out of paper and ended up sketching the final solution across a few napkins.

UI Drafting

Includes refined UI drafts developed in the later stage to finalize interaction patterns, visual hierarchy, and usability before moving to high-fidelity design.

Result & Metrics

Square Savings now manages $1B+ in holdings for 55M+ customers, becoming a key part of Square’s global ecosystem.

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