This paper focuses on the process of designing and implementing an online support community for patients. After an introduction we describe a process for translating the socio-technical needs of cancer patients into system requirements as well as the development steps towards a functioning community platform for cancer patients. We combine a generic iterative process model for systems development with a prototyping approach towards an engineering process model for community platforms for cancer patients. We focus on specialties and challenges during the system development concerning user interface development and system requirements? analysis. The objective is to derive a model for developing community platforms that has a proven track of being applicable during system development.
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