Stars replaced with smiley faces - ratings suffering?

[fastadking]

Buyers now see a series of faces that go from frown to big smile and must pick one to rate their delivery. Those somehow translate into stars. I'm seeing more customers rate less than all smiles when they were giving 5 stars before. 4 and 4.7 are more common now. I doubt the design team thought about this when they switched to smiley faces for ratings. Or maybe they don't care. 

Ratings are now, for the first time ever, given directly for the perceived quality of the work and it's value. In the past, buyer's were rating based on ancillary questions (buy again and tell a friend) 

 

Edited February 3 by fastadking

[vovkaslovesnyy]

4 minutes ago, fastadking said:

I doubt the design team thought about this when they switched to smiley faces for ratings.

It was their initial intention. 

They claim that "ratings between 4.0-4.9 are actually more trustworthy" while demanding sellers to have 4.4+ to keep their level. 

[uk1000]

The smiley faces in the new ratings do seem less professional than before, when I thought they were previously trying to make the site more professional.

They're intentionally making it so people get less stars in general - so people aren't shown with the vast majority having 5.0 stars avg.

Though I don't think many people getting a very good delivery that they're really happy with would have an expression like their "exceptional" smiley face when they get it. And maybe if that expression is nothing like their expression maybe they'd be a lot less likely to pick it, even when they're totally happy with the delivery.

 

[donnovan86]

22 minutes ago, uk1000 said:

They're intentionally making it so people get less stars in general - so people aren't shown with the vast majority having 5.0 stars avg.

 

The majority of active sellers are level 2, and they have 5 stars on average. So yeah, it's difficult for a buyer to figure out who to work with. I get it why they are making this change and I agree that the emoticons aren't really professional. But then again, I don't think emoticons play a role in what rating people leave. It's still 5 stars if they leave 5 stars for all 3 criteria. 

[fastadking]

Non-stop 5 stars often has to do with "bedside manner" as much as quality. A pretty/handsome face and buyer reviews written by "feel your pain" GPT will win every time. 

[donnovan86]

19 minutes ago, fastadking said:

Non-stop 5 stars often has to do with "bedside manner" as much as quality.

In the long run, I think it might be a good thing. For now, this transition period had its fair share of frustrations. 

I think the outrage will come from the new leveling system. Because older sellers seem to suffer the most. They are taking into account all previous reviews for your gig, even if your gig is 10 years old like mine, for example. And random reviews from a few years or even a decade ago will have some influence on our seller score. Which is not exactly fair.. Sure, even if newer reviews are more important when it comes to influencing the success score, I don't think that 1 star reviews with "great work" should be taken into consideration.

It certainly seems to me that people with an older tenure on Fiverr will be punished, whereas newer gigs won't be affected. Does Fiverr want us to create only new gigs? It certainly feels like that at least in my opinion. 

[uk1000]

2 hours ago, donnovan86 said:

The majority of active sellers are level 2, and they have 5 stars on average.

Most of them seem to have 5.0 stars, though there are also lots of level 2 sellers with 4.9 stars.

So for level 2 it's probably something like around 50% of those sellers have 5.0 stars, around 40% have 4.9 stars and the rest have less stars. Though it's the level conditions that also restrict the range. Fiverr could show the real figures though.

I still think they should show the seller's rating to 2 decimal places to make it easier to compare.

Edited February 3 by uk1000

[donnovan86]

3 minutes ago, uk1000 said:

So for level 2 it's probably something like around 50% of those sellers have 5.0 stars,

That's still a lot... don't you think? 

[fastadking]

The 1 and 2 stars mostly come when there are LOTS of orders. It seems to be a probability thing. Somebody on the forum years ago said they got 1 difficult customer in every 20. And there always seems to be 2 difficult customers right around the same time. I've found that to be very true month after month. Anyone with hundreds or over 1,000 reviews will have a collection of negative reviews.