💡 Market Day Pre-Trip Confidence Dashboard

[github-actions[bot]]

Summary

Aggregate vendor check-in status, historical attendance reliability, and market operational status into a single glanceable confidence indicator for customers deciding whether to visit. Rachel sees "Riverside Market: 28/35 vendors confirmed, last updated 12 min ago" instead of checking 10 individual vendor profiles. This is the product's core thesis — confidence-first positioning — made tangible as a UI surface.

Market Signal

No competitor offers a synthesized confidence metric for market visits. MarketSpread and ManageMyMarket show attendance data to managers only. Farmstander, Soko, and Localize show individual vendor status but don't aggregate it into a decision-support signal. This is a blue-ocean feature — the PRD calls it "confidence-first positioning" and "failed-trip reduction" as the core differentiator. Digital loyalty program research shows visit-frequency tracking is table stakes — but pre-visit confidence scoring is novel.

User Signal

Existing idea #70 (Customer failed-trip feedback loop) addresses post-trip instrumentation of the north-star metric. This idea addresses the pre-trip side: giving customers the confidence signal before they leave home. The PRD's primary success criteria is "Customers complete follow actions after searching (search → follow conversion)" — a confidence dashboard directly drives this by reducing uncertainty. Rachel's journey explicitly calls out "she's been burned twice" by unreliable market info.

Technical Opportunity

The data already flows through the system: vendor check-ins (FR14), market status (FR9), and freshness timestamps (FR33) provide the raw inputs. The confidence dashboard is a read-only aggregation view — no new write paths needed. It can start as a simple ratio (checked-in / total rostered vendors) and grow to incorporate historical reliability data from the audit log (FR35-39). Cloud Run's stateless architecture supports this as a computed query.

Assessment

Dimension	Score	Rationale
Feasibility	high	Read-only aggregation of existing check-in data; no new write paths
Impact	high	Directly addresses the core value proposition (failed-trip reduction); unique in market
Urgency	high	Core differentiator that should be designed into Epic 6 from the start, not bolted on later

Adversarial Review

Strongest objection: The confidence score is only meaningful if vendor check-in adoption is high. At pilot scale with 40 vendors, early data will be sparse.

Rebuttal: The score degrades gracefully: "12/35 vendors confirmed" still tells Rachel something useful, even if incomplete. More importantly, the score creates positive pressure on the flywheel — managers see low confirmation rates and nudge vendors (FR18), vendors see that checking in drives visibility. The feature bootstraps itself. Frame as transparent data ("N confirmed"), not as a prediction ("good day to visit").

Suggested Next Step

Design the confidence dashboard as a customer-facing component in Epic 6 (Customer Discovery) that reads from the check-in and market status data models established in Epics 4-5. Create a UX mockup showing the aggregated view on the market detail screen.