Square
Debit card disputes
Overview
Square’s business debit card helps users with Square checking accounts tap into their money instantly and help them spend as soon as they make a sale. A key feature to help users feel safe and to ensure Square can protect their money is providing debit card holders the ability to dispute transactions that are fraudulent or that have other issues.
Problem
The disputes process was the largest complaint driver for all banking products at Square and led to a 7% churn. This disproportionately impacted high value sellers and a new company initiative to provide all sellers with a checking account was going to lead to exponentially more disputes.
Our research team helped uncover a key insight that the "dispute submission flow is deceptively simple; sellers don't understand and misinterpret the questions." Despite its apparent simplicity, the submission process created significant challenges. When sellers answered questions about their issues (necessary for Square to gather information for card network disputes), the experience was so ineffective that 100% of credit-related disputes required Square to follow up for additional information.
My role
I was the lead product designer on this project and partnered closely with a content designer to redesign the disputes experience to help drive down Seller churn and reduce the amount of follow up questions Square needs to ask. We also collaborated closely with our product, engineering, policy, and operation counterparts to help make this a reality.
Transaction detail
The transaction page is the primary place sellers discover something is wrong and start the process to file a dispute.
I redesigned the page to include a lot more data we have about the transaction and to help sellers better understand if they made the purchase and if it looks correct.
Entry point
Our research uncovered a lot of sellers having difficulty locating how to start a dispute, as the option was hidden unless the seller tapped on an ambiguous icon button in the corner. I redesigned this page to include a clear "Need Help" button that sellers could tap to open a bottom sheet where they can choose to start a dispute or contact customer service for help. Using this approach also better helps our localization efforts for international expansion.
Intake flow
The intake flow is a core part of the dispute submission experience, as this is the primary way Square gathers the necessary information to file a dispute and submit it to the card network. In redesigning this experience, we created a new intro screen that builds trust with sellers by establishing clear expectations from the start; showing exactly what information they'll need to provide, what will happen next in the intake flow, and presenting realistic timeframes for resolution.
To develop the most effective questions for the dispute flow, the content designer and I conducted extensive research into Mastercard's network regulations for filing disputes. We collaborated closely with our policy partners to transform a massive list of potential dispute reasons into a streamlined set of the most common issue types encountered by Square sellers.
Our approach prioritized transparency by presenting all available dispute options at once, allowing sellers to select the one that best matched their situation. After multiple rounds of testing and iteration, we discovered that showing the complete set of options yielded better results. Where sellers could better align their understanding of the situation when they could see and compare all possible choices.
We also removed almost all free form questions and asked sellers to answer questions by selecting from structured, pre-written answer options. We not only streamlined the process for sellers but also ensured they provided the specific information needed to maximize dispute success rates. This structured approach also enabled us to standardize response data, allowing Square to automate more of the dispute filing process and significantly increase our internal filing capacity.
For questions requiring free form answers, we optimized the process by reducing the need for sellers to write anything manually. Instead, we pre-populate responses using information extracted from uploaded documents such as receipts earlier in the process and ask the seller to confirm that it looks right before continuing.
Status
I redesigned the dispute details page with a focus on abstracting away unnecessary status complexity, presenting only contextually relevant information to sellers at each stage of the process. I also improved how sellers navigated to this page by introducing a direct link from the original transaction page and all relevant seller communications. This helped address a key pain point where sellers had difficulty finding their dispute status, leading to significant support volume.