Square is keeping on-pace with the evolving payments space. You’d never think they could outdo the sheer simplicity of the original reader—one that snapped in the headphone jack of your iPhone—but they have. The new NFC reader has the same elegance the original reader, perhaps even more.

Elegance isn’t easy to define. It’s much easier to see and experience. And to achieve elegance is a challenge. It takes time and finesse. But Square continues to do it. Because they care.

They care enough to build their reader from scratch. To engineer their own hardware. To engineer their own software too. They do it all and they do it really well. And in the end, it’s elegant. Sometimes their approach reminds me of another company.

“There are dozens of places where you can buy EMV software stacks, but we don’t want to do any of that, because we wanted to have end-to-end control of the system,” Dorogusker says.

In the article Jesse Dorogusker, Square’s hardware lead, also addresses the merchant-customer experience of NFC.

The NFC interaction is more about, you control your phone and watch. You’re not going to hand your phone to me. There has to be a way for my space and your space to be mediated.

Social norms are at the center of monetary transactions. People have a close, complex relationship with their money. This was something I couldn’t ignore during my internship at Square. Payment startups must consider social norms during their design process. Square is clearly doing this.

Oh, and as for that icon, that’s the unfortunate standard.