It now wants people involved in both sides of the procurement process to respond to the consultation to tell GDS if the categories make sense. 

The government released a provisional timetable for the ninth iteration of the framework last week, with applications to open March and services due to be available from May. 

At the time, the Digital Marketplace team said that it was still doing user research to better define questions for suppliers, which it said would be shared before applications open. 

In October, GDS said that the G-Cloud 9 discovery phase had found that users struggled with ineffective searches, producing audit trails and difficulty comparing suppliers. 

It said: “There is no shared terminology for the way G-Cloud products and services are being described. Suppliers often describe the same types of services in a variety of ways,” the post said. 

 “This inconsistency in language makes it more difficult for buyers to find what they need. Suppliers told us that they resort to guesswork to find the keywords buyers are using when searching for services.”