The Jovian Friction–Harm Index

If you've ever sat in a meeting where everyone agrees the system is "painful," you know the next question: what do we fix first? Pretty dashboards don't help when people are re-typing the same information three times, losing work to timeouts, or guessing where a referral went.

The Jovian Friction–Harm Index is our answer. Think of it as NASA-TLX's practical cousin — instead of measuring mental workload in the abstract, JFHI measures operational friction: the everyday slowdowns, confusions, and risks that sap time and harm outcomes. The purpose is blunt: reduce harm, not just increase happiness. Less rework, fewer clicks, safer handoffs — and time handed back to people.

What it produces

A ranked list of UX problems, scored by the damage they actually cause — a prioritized hit list that frontline staff and leadership can align behind. Each pattern is scored across five dimensions:

1. Prevalence (P) — how many people encounter it
2. Task coverage (T) — how many common tasks it disrupts
3. Phase coverage (F) — how many lifecycle stages it touches
4. System spread (S) — how many systems or teams it crosses
5. Rework / error (R) — how often it causes redo, incidents, or manual workarounds

JFHI = 100 × (0.35·P + 0.25·T + 0.15·F + 0.15·S + 0.10·R)

The weights prioritize frequency and task impact while still capturing cross-system effects and operational cost. Qualitative pain becomes quantitative priority — without losing the story that explains it.

JFHI usually rides shotgun on a Transit Review — the studio's operations-centered pass over a system as it actually runs, named for how astronomers learn a planet's truth: watch it cross its star and measure what dims. The review finds the patterns; the index ranks them.

How it runs

1. Listen widely — rapid surveys, interviews, workshops. The patterns surface fast: duplicate entry, click-heavy workflows, unclear handoffs.
2. Ground it in real work — map every pattern to actual tasks and lifecycle stages.
3. Trace the blast radius — which teams, which systems, where the rework lands.
4. Score and rank — sort from "hurts most" to "nice to improve."
5. Act fast — the top items become 90-day interventions; the rest stage into a 3–5 year roadmap.

Less argument, more movement. Teams see why priorities are priorities; leaders can fund with confidence.

The guardrails

Construct validity: it targets operational friction, not vague "satisfaction." Reliability: multiple coders on workshop analysis, differences resolved before scoring. Honesty: recompute after pilots — the top harms should stay stable unless new data says otherwise. Privacy: log events and timings only, never PII, with role-based visibility. And it travels: pattern data expressed abstractly (no real org or system names) can be scored, ranked, and turned into intervention drafts by any capable LLM — with the decisions, as always, staying human.

In short: clarity, speed, and alignment — a shared, evidence-based way to fix what truly matters first. If your team is arguing about priorities instead of moving on them, that's the meeting to invite us to.