Supporting enhanced menu customization
The problem
Square was losing restaurant deals to competitors, and user research pointed to a common sentiment: Square wasn’t built for restaurants. The most common ask was to support adding specific quantities of an item modifier. As is, Modifiers were binary—on or off. Restaurants with complex menus were either going without core functionality, or they were building messy workarounds with duplicate modifier sets. A $100M opportunity in the restaurant vertical was on the line, and strategic sellers were threatening to churn.
My role
As the design DRI, I was the sole designer for setup/management, and partnered with design and engineering across Square Online, Food & Beverage, and Point-of-Sale teams to ship across all touchpoints for the feature.
We’re going to need a bigger scope
Two things made this genuinely difficult:
Engineering discovery revealed dependencies on teams whose roadmaps were locked for the foreseeable future. I worked with engineering to scope a solution that could ship independently, trading some long-term flexibility for speed to market.
The deeper problem was structural. Modifier settings were split across two pages with no clear logic, and adding quantity controls on top would make it worse. I advocated to leadership that we needed to fix the underlying experience alongside the new feature, or risk eroding trust with the exact vertical we were trying to win. The scope expanded.
The solution
I restructured modifier settings to match how sellers actually think: one page for defaults, one for per-item overrides, with a clear relationship between them. I also designed new min/max controls that adapted their logic based on whether quantities were enabled, keeping the simple case simple while supporting the complex one. Adding modifier quantities didn’t require the users to learn a new system or lose features they were used to, and as an added bonus they had improved control over their modifier sets.
The impact
A $17M seller that was about to churn saw an early demo, called it “even better than expected,” stayed, and became our first beta tester.
The updates were featured in Square’s inaugural product releases event. Sellers cleaned up their catalogs, deleting duplicate workaround modifier sets.
