This is such a common issue with Square; it's becoming increasingly tiresome.
I truly love their product offering. It's extremely competitive on pricing and allows businesses to operate at a more efficient level than you would expect. But it is so rough around the edges, and their development really demonstrates this.
With every change with Square, it's as if there is a constant battle between the design/front-end and more fundamental dev teams, and the design teams always win. Fundamental, functional feature requests basically never get implemented and instead we get UI updates every few months. Whether it be the POS app/terminal constantly changing (search menus becoming more buried, checkout screens actually decreasing the amount of info provided, product family navigation requiring multiple clicks etc) or the web app changing its nav menu, as in this thread, something is ALWAYS being updated.
For me, this product should first and foremost be functional. As long as the design works, you basically shouldn't need to change it.
I have experienced this both as a professional and as a consumer. Design teams seem to lobby their workplace to constantly iterate and adjust their design to justify their employment. Which I understand. But Square at a higher level needs leadership which focuses more on the usability aspect and guides its design teams to understand the user requirements as their first port of call. I have never once been asked if I like Square's new UI changes. No poll to ask if I feel it needs to be reverted or overhauled. Nothing. So, from where are they making the determination that their changes are beneficial?!
This is what annoys me the most as a professional developer. The first stages of development is understanding stakeholder requirements. The stakeholder is us, the users. Square has a fiduciary duty to their shareholders, but they genuinely would not be the primary stakeholders in the development cycle if I was leading it.
I think I speak for most people in that customer-facing stuff (i.e. terminal screens etc) is the only thing I need to be somewhat pretty. I genuinely couldn't care less if MY side of Square looked like a website from the 90s. I need quickly accessible, rapidly functional stuff. So many fundamental core features continue to be missing from Square. You know what I don't see much of in these forums? Feature requests for design changes. Most people are fine with the design. They want the product to be functionally better.
Yet, Square just rolls out changes like this which make no sense to 99% of its users who just want to access maybe 5 specific pages a day. Whoever accepted this new design without thinking "hmm, maybe we need the ability to add favourites/shortcuts" at a minimum is emblematic of the problems at Square on the whole.
