Digital Marketplace puts focus on feedback for coming year

'Feedback loop' being developed to try to improve the new home of G-Cloud

The new home of G-Cloud, the Digital Marketplace, is developing a new "feedback loop" which it hopes will "inform future improvements to the service".

A blog post on the site stated: "By collating meaningful data from user research, website analytics, on-site feedback, helpdesk data, cost data and social media metrics, we're able to understand user needs and develop our services and platform accordingly.

"When iterations are implemented, we then review the data to check whether our design decisions are working, starting the whole cycle again.

According to the post, there will be four stages of marking a successful feedback loop: consistent cross-channel communication, monitoring user engagement, long-term monitoring and user insight driving service design and communication strategy.

The blog also said: "The idea of a feedback loop isn't new or particularly complex, but it's one of those things that's great in theory and difficult to make a reality."

Three factors were highlighted as obstacles to the success of the system: influences on service usage, such as the problem of websites falling on Google rankings for "no apparent reason"; data overload, as in the issue of knowing which analytics reports to focus on; and contextual factors, ie finding the right data strategy within the best context.

News of the feedback focus comes ahead of the launch of G-Cloud 6, which could be up and running by the first week of February.