Talking to the "magic mirror": User-oriented design of applications for online counselling

What is counselling and what is required of an application that supports this kind of work? This dissertation uses three approaches of the field of human-computer interaction in order to answer this question and demonstrates innovative ways of applying the internet in counselling. It offers a new, holistic concept of counselling as a double embedded interactive service and introduces different supportive materials for the user-oriented design process: a questionnaire, a reference model and a collection of design patterns. It furthermore demonstrates innovative ideas for the design of applications for online counselling