Flikshop — Product Journey Redesign

Overview

Product Journey Redesign — bridging distance by designing digital solutions for connection. Over four sprint cycles spanning nine months, our team developed a strategic branding and marketing plan through a redesign of Flikshop's mobile platform and website, refreshing the UX/UI to modern standards with a focus on accessibility, visuals, onboarding, and brand cohesion.

As Product Manager, I analyzed qualitative and quantitative data to define pain points and user needs, defined the product vision and roadmap in alignment with business goals, developed user flow strategies and wireframe guidelines for web and mobile, and facilitated design sessions and stakeholder meetings to drive team collaboration.

The Client

Founded in 2016, Flikshop simplifies communication between incarcerated individuals and their families by letting users send personalized postcards from a phone or computer directly to correctional facilities, at an affordable price.

Flikshop has since expanded well beyond postcards: Flikshop School of Business exposes currently and formerly incarcerated individuals to entrepreneurship and workforce-readiness skills; Flikshop Angels lets families and nonprofit partners pre-purchase and deliver credits to incarcerated individuals; and Flikshop Neighborhood connects community organizations and second-chance employers with the resources and programs formerly incarcerated people need. For its founder and CEO, Marcus Bullock, the product is personal — he has spoken publicly about how staying connected to family through mail during his own incarceration kept him going.

Problem Statement

Flikshop's rapid expansion left it with low product adoption and a fractured user experience across its growing set of services. The company faced a strategic fork: invest in expanding its market, or invest in improving the experience for its existing users — without clear research to guide the decision, leadership was hesitant to move in either direction. Flikshop needed a data-driven approach to inform its next steps in brand and market strategy.

Discovery

We started by understanding the landscape and user needs. A competitive analysis assessed Flikshop against existing solutions to identify gaps and differentiation opportunities; the result showed Flikshop already offers a more diverse set of product offerings than its competitors.

In parallel, we surveyed two potential expansion audiences — military families (6 responses, a 17-question survey) and elderly users and their family members (20 responses, a 23-question survey) — to test whether either group represented a viable growth segment. Military respondents reported near-daily access to technology even while stationed abroad and consistently preferred texting and video calling over physical media; the communication friction they did report came from time zones and connectivity, not something Flikshop could solve. Elderly respondents were similarly comfortable with digital photo-sharing and split on whether they'd want a physical-mail alternative at all.

Our recommendation: don't prioritize additional business resources on acquiring either audience. Both groups already had preferred, working methods for staying in touch, limiting Flikshop's potential utility to them.

Design

With the guiding question “How do we get Flikshop users to enroll in and use more vertical products?”, we shifted our mapping approach — running a Q&A session with the client instead of a traditional mapping exercise to surface marketing and process gaps across the current product suite. From those answers, we built “How Might We” questions for each product service, and the client voted on which directions to sketch. From there, the team moved through sketching, deciding, and prototyping.

Testing

To validate the prototype, we built a user testing plan covering both current Flikshop users and people unfamiliar with the product, to establish a benchmark for measuring improvement. Testers worked through four core tasks: create a new account, find Flikshop's course offerings, book a demo for Flikshop Neighborhoods, and create and send a postcard.

Deliverables

The team shifted focus from the iOS app to the mobile web application, creating a unified solution for the mobile and desktop website experience. This included an updated information architecture to reduce friction in the user journey and redesigned landing pages for flagship products. A set of interaction walkthroughs from the redesigned experience, covering onboarding, core navigation, and the Flikshop Angels donation flow.