Juniper Milestone Tracker

Overview

Juniper combines clinical guidance, medication, and personalised coaching to support women in achieving sustainable weight loss.

After the initial launch of the Juniper mobile app, we identified a critical gap: users were hitting plateaus and experiencing natural weight fluctuations that hindered long-term progress. We saw an opportunity to design solutions that not only surface meaningful insights but also guide users through these challenges, turning moments of frustration into actionable, confidence-building experiences.

Problem

While 70% of new Juniper app users track their weight in the first two weeks, half stop by week six.

Early analysis suggested that stagnating progress, temporary setbacks, or a lack of clear goals were undermining ongoing engagement. This presented an opportunity to design interventions that sustain motivation, provide context around fluctuations and help users visualise meaningful milestones throughout their weight loss journey.

After 6 weeks on the program, 50% of these users stop tracking their weight weekly.

Opportunity

Help patients stay motivated and manage expectations by showing how progress can slow as they near their goal and is not linear.

Discovery phase

We lacked a clear understanding of patient weight-tracking behaviour, so I led a two-week research sprint to uncover how patients use the current tracking experience and why engagement drops over time.

The research aimed to understand:
• Why patients stop tracking their weight over time
• How patients use the current tracking flow in practice
• Key frustrations and moments of value within the existing experience

Interview type

Structured user interview

Participants

13 patients

Age groups

11 women over the age of 40

2 women under the age of 30

Method

Remote via Zoom

What did we uncover?

From the interviews, several consistent patterns emerged in how patients experienced weight tracking:
• Patients often track their weight out of obligation rather than motivation
• Plateaus and weight gain significantly reduce motivation and confidence
• Patients respond positively to seeing goals broken into bite-sized, achievable milestones
• The existing tracking graph feels too simplistic to meaningfully support progress
• Many patients are unaware of the unlimited Health Coach support available through the Juniper program

I use [the tracking] because I know that at some point, either the doctor or a dietitian might ask for it.

Tracking out of obligation

When I do log my weight, it’s because I’ve lost weight. If I am not losing weight, I don’t wanna remind myself.

Loss of motivation

With the current tracking graph in the app, you don’t see your entire progress…I want to see everything.

Limited long-term view

Happy Scale gives me some really good graphs, but it also gives trends, breaks it up into milestones, gives you a predicted rate and a current rate.

Milestones and trends

Synthesised the interview findings into three key insights to help shape our product strategy and experience direction.

These insights highlighted that patients weren’t struggling with tracking itself, but with how progress was framed and supported over time.

Value-driven tracking

Move beyond obligatory weight logging towards progress that feels meaningful.

Holistic view of their journey

Show progress over time, rather than isolated data points.

Motivation and support

Normalise plateaus, celebrate wins, and provide reassurance.

Value-driven tracking

Move beyond obligatory weight logging towards progress that feels meaningful.

Icon of a person with a dotted line leading to a location pin, representing a holistic view or process.

Holistic view of their journey

Show progress over time, rather than isolated data points.

Hand holding a medical cross symbol inside a circle on a light purple background.

Motivation and support

Normalise plateaus, celebrate wins, and provide reassurance.

Define phase

Aligning the opportunity with real patient needs

Using these insights, we reframed the opportunity to focus on supporting motivation and expectation-setting throughout the patient journey.

Help patients stay motivated and manage expectations

by showing how progress can slow as they near their goal and that progress is not linear.

throughout their weight-loss journey by introducing a health-orientated milestone tracker.

Translating insights into a focused feature set

We synthesised validated insights from recent discovery interviews with existing qualitative research and feedback from the Juniper Facebook community. We then aligned these findings with our current product roadmap to prioritise both new and existing features that would best support motivation and long-term progress.

Prioritised feature set

✔ Set a healthy goal weight
✔ Communicate health benefits
✔ Predicted time frame to reach goal weight
✔ Easy-to-use milestone tracker
✔ Celebrate wins
✔ Assistance during plateaus and regressions

Two teams, one objective. Delivering goal setting and milestones as connected experiences

To deliver the milestone tracker end to end, we split ownership across two teams while maintaining a shared objective:
• Onboarding team: goal setting during first-time app use
• Tracking (my team): milestone-based progress and ongoing support
• We designed in parallel and tested together to validate decisions and maintain a consistent end-to-end experience

Tracking team deliverables

✔ Easy-to-use milestone tracker
✔ Celebrate wins
✔ Assistance during plateaus and regressions

Onboarding team deliverables

✔ Set a healthy goal weight
✔ Communicate health benefits
✔ Predicted time frame to reach goal weight

Designing for real-world progress and support

To design the milestone tracker end to end, we mapped patient scenarios to understand how progress and setbacks might unfold over time. This allowed us to define both happy and unhappy paths, identify edge cases, and design a structured experience that supports patients through non-linear progress.

In parallel, the Onboarding team collaborated with engineers, practitioners, and health coaches to define the clinical logic for healthy goal setting, milestone breakdowns, and proactive patient support.

Design phase

Exploring milestone tracker concepts.

With a clear understanding of patient scenarios, edge cases, and milestone logic, we moved into exploring how this experience could be expressed in the UI.
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• Explored milestone tracker card designs using our existing component library
• Focused on layout and hierarchy to clearly communicate progress and next steps
• Incorporated the milestone breakdown logic defined in earlier phases
• Designed and tested multiple variations, experimenting with different data points and milestone visualisations

Iteration 1: Feedback and learnings

I shared early milestone tracker concepts with the design team to gather feedback, providing clear context and a feedback guide to ensure input focused on usability, hierarchy, and clarity.

To validate the designs with patients, I then conducted usability testing to understand what resonated and where confusion emerged.
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What we learned:
• Milestones introduced a strong sense of motivation and gamification
• Some patients struggled to understand where they were in their overall journey
• Feedback was split on the usefulness of predicted dates
• Alignment between the milestone tracker and the predicted journey experience (owned by the Onboarding team) was critical

Iteration 2: Refining clarity and progress

Based on usability testing and design sparring feedback, I iterated on the milestone tracker to improve clarity, focus, and sense of progress.

• Condensed information and reduced competing data points
• Made the milestone progress ring more prominent to clearly signal progress
• Improved how patients visualise and navigate through milestones across their journey

Iteration 3: Final refinement and polish

In the final iteration, I refined the milestone tracker to balance clarity, motivation, and completeness across the experience.

• Enhanced key data points to provide meaningful context without overwhelming patients
• Further developed the milestone progress ring to clearly show both the starting point and end goal
• Refined milestone and goal-weight celebrations to reinforce progress and maintain motivation

Design: Preparing for build

To ensure a smooth transition from design to delivery, I prepared the Figma file for handover with a strong focus on clarity, logic, and build readiness.
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• Structured files with clear flows and screen groupings
• Detailed interaction, logic, and animation specs embedded directly in Figma
• Close collaboration with engineering to validate feasibility and reduce ambiguity during build

Deliver phase - Final milestone experience

Helping patients focus on what matters next

The milestone tracker breaks long-term goals into smaller, achievable steps, helping patients stay focused and motivated throughout their journey.
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• Breaks goal weight into clear, achievable milestones
• Focuses attention on one milestone at a time to reduce overwhelm
• Improves goal clarity by showing what to work towards next

Reinforcing progress through meaningful celebration

Milestones are celebrated with health-focused feedback and subtle animations to reinforce progress beyond the number on the scale.
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• Promotes long-term health behaviours and improves their overall well-being
• Provides a sense of accomplishment, making their journey enjoyable and meaningful
• Reinforces positive behaviours that patients are more likely to stay engaged in their health goals

Connecting milestones with day-to-day progress

To create continuity across the experience, milestones were integrated into the existing tracking graph using a goal line.

• Shows how daily weight entries contribute towards the next milestone
• Increases confidence and motivation as patients see how close they are to the next milestone
• Encourages ongoing engagement with regular tracking

Together, these designs transformed weight tracking from a passive logging task into an active, motivating journey grounded in achievable progress and health outcomes.

Outcomes

The milestone tracker shifted weight tracking from a passive, obligation-driven task to an experience that patients understood, engaged with and completed. Outcomes showed that reframing progress around achievable milestones - rather than raw weight data - meaningfully improved both engagement and follow-through.

Clear value drove immediate adoption

↑ 56 %

Initial adoption

Over half of the community engaged with the milestone tracker within the first day, indicating strong clarity and perceived value.

↑ 15 %

Sustained adoption

Follow-up email communication reinforcing the benefits of goal sharing led to continued growth in usage over time.

Improved motivation increased ongoing tracking

↑ 12 %

Weekly tracking

Weekly weight tracking increased from 60% to 72%, suggesting milestones helped patients stay engaged beyond the initial setup.

Reduced friction led to near-perfect completion

↑ 97 %

Feature completion rate

Once patients started the milestone setup, nearly all completed it - validating the clarity, guidance, and pacing of the experience.

Challenges and learnings

Resolving cross-team misalignment

Key learning: When teams design in parallel, clear ownership and decision boundaries are just as important as shared goals. Without them, even well-aligned teams can lose momentum.

What happened?

Working in parallel across two teams initially led to misalignment, duplicated effort and friction as designs evolved.

Why it happened

Although both teams were aligned on the same objective, ownership and boundaries weren’t clearly defined upfront, creating confusion around responsibilities and decision-making.

How I addressed it

I facilitated a cross-team alignment session to clarify ownership, define interfaces between experiences, and agree on a clear division of work, enabling smoother collaboration and faster decision-making moving forward.

Designing the goal weight and milestone tracker in the Juniper mobile app