May 15, 2026
Cash App, with a per-payment Business toggle
Letting people protect a single purchase, without converting their whole account.
role
Product Designer
timeline
V1 Jan-Feb 2024
V2 Mar–Jun 2026
duration
5 months
stack
5 months
01 — PROBLEM
Every Cash App payment is treated like it’s to a friend
People use Cash App to buy from strangers: resale, Marketplace listings, tickets, commissions. But Cash App has no purchase protection for payments you authorize. [01] If the item never shows up, there’s no dispute to open and no way to get your money back.
02 — COMPETITIVE ANALYSIS
Cash App is the industry outlier
I compared Cash App with its biggest competitors on how they handle paying for things. Venmo and PayPal both let you mark a single payment as a purchase. Cash App is the only one of the three big social payment apps that doesn’t.
67%
of Cash App’s major competitors already let you protect one payment. The feature I’m designing isn’t new to the industry, it's just Cash App.
03 — USER RESEARCH
Users assumed protection that doesn’t exist
I interviewed 7 Cash App users about how they pay for things. Most believed Cash App would step in if a purchase went wrong.
"I’m a small business owner, so I use Cash App with my business account pretty often. [...] Honestly nothing’s gone wrong yet, so I just kind of assumed it was working fine? [...] I think it gave me peace of mind, like, that the business account was the safer one. That it protects sellers."
Mia Z.
Participant #1
“This one feels calm. When I’m already sick and stressed, I don’t want an app that adds to it. The blue makes it feel like something I can actually trust with my info.”
Emilia N.
College Student
04 — CURRENT MODEL
Users assumed protection that doesn’t exist
If you want to treat a payment as a business transaction, Cash App points you to a Business account. That’s a big commitment and change for someone who just wants to buy one thing.
Venmo's model
A business profile attached to your personal one
Same login, two profiles. Buyers can also protect any single payment with a toggle, no business profile needed.
Event then, a Business account still doesn’t have any protections for both sellers and customers.
05 — DESIGN GOALS
Users assumed protection that doesn’t exist
If you want to treat a payment as a business transaction, Cash App points you to a Business account. That’s a big commitment and change for someone who just wants to buy one thing.
07 — REFLECTION
Final thoughts & takeaways
Two testers can’t prove a design works
Testing with a college student and a registered nurse showed me the patient side and the clinician side, and both changed the design. But two people can’t confirm a pattern. Next, I’d test the logging flow with 5–8 students who are actually sick, and time how long a full entry takes against the old form.
AI gave a fast first draft, but I refined to the final version
Figma Make and Claude Design got me to clickable screens in hours instead of days, which meant I could test sooner. But the first versions looked generic, and the AI couldn’t tell when a screen felt stressful. Deciding what to keep, what to cut and what the AI insight is allowed to say was my job.
A pattern that works in one place may not work everywhere
Tappable bubbles fixed the symptom flow, so I assumed they’d fix medications and events too. They didn’t. A wall of medication chips was consistent on the surface but slower in practice. Showing the user’s own medications first, then a few common ones, worked better than copying the symptom layout.