Increasing user acceptance and market readiness @Neardeal
Neardeal is a B2B2C wellness booking platform helping merchants get discovered, booked and engage their patrons through our SaaS platform and consumer facing app.
Role
Product Design
UX Design
Team
Niket Murudkar - COO
Development team
Duration
8 months (March - November 2025)
Tools
Concepts - sketching
Figma - wireframing
Phase - animations
What is
Neardeal solves the trust and safety issue for users looking to find and book wellness merchants like spas, saunas, gyms and masseuses, while enabling these merchants to engage their customers and grow their digital footprint.
Neardeal currently offers 3 products, a merchant web portal for booking management, a consumer app and a merchant app. During my tenure, I mostly worked on the merchant web portal and consumer app. This case study will mostly focus on my work on the consumer app.
I played a large role in managing the products, interfacing with and managing development, along with designing and improving the user experience.
Role
Product Design
UX Design
Team
Niket Murudkar - COO
Technotackle - Development team
Duration
8 months
March - November 2025
Tools
Concepts - sketching
Figma - wireframing
Phase - animations
Problem
Increasing usability and market readiness in a pre-launch app
What I did
Identified usability issues
I used UIUX principles such as the design heuristics to identify possible usability issues and identified missing functionality.
Wireframed design flows
I used low fidelity wireframe sketching for ideating and coming up with potential solutions to design and flow problems identified.
Designed improved flows
I created high fidelity wireframes for new flows and then prototyped them for easy development implementation.
Research and strategy formulation
I did user and market research and helped refine the business model and product strategy for Neardeal to better compete in the market.
Created product requirement documentation
I created product documentation to increase communication and transparency by reduce ambiguity about tasks, who is doing them and what the success criteria looks like.
Met with the development team
I synced with the development team once a week to check on development process, see what they needed from me and prepare for the next cycle.
Outcome
↓ 88%
in usability issues reported
Increased user friendliness, reducing issue reports in testing from 50 to 6.
↑ 70%
critical feature coverage
Improved user experience, by adding 25 critical flows (from 36 to 61)
↑ 90%
in release quality
Increased synergy, resulting in issues on new releases falling from 65 to 6.
↑ 50%
development speed
Cut development time estimates from 8 to 4 months.
Vimbai is a dependable and hardworking professional who takes ownership of his responsibilities and consistently seeks to meet timelines. He thoughtfully contributes ideas that challenge existing assumptions, shares his perspectives openly for the benefit of the team, and approaches his work with careful attention to detail and a data‑driven mindset.
Niket Murudkar
COO & Co-Founder @Neardeal
Reflection
What did I learn?
A lack of a clear and consistent spacing system and design system can make maintaining consistency for future designers quite hard.
Got to make animation lotties for the first time, and started getting into motion design.
Saw how using nudge techniques can create a more positive experience for users, while increasing conversions.
Other necessary screens like loading and force update screens that can be needed for mobile app development.
What would I improve?
More time to finish working on the settings flow so it covers all necessary elements.
Getting to implement the future booking flow that allows users to make bookings for friends.
Next Case Study
Thank you for reading this far, you can take a look at my next portfolio case study if you'd like to see more of my projects.
