John Crisp

The ORCA process provides a set of tools and a process for analyzing user research, domain information, and stakeholder directions, yielding a set of design outputs with phased implementation and extensibility "baked in". It takes nothing from creativity, while adding the safety of carrying the important details all the way through, into the final design.

OOUX/ORCA is an excellent bridge between UX Research and UX Design, providing a framework to make design decisions based on the evidence discovered during research. The ORCA approach ensures the system design will match the user's mental model; this reduces the users' cognitive load, and bakes navigation through the objects in the user's mental model into the design. Finally, from a development perspective, the data needs and relationships are generated early in the process. This allows quicker development with less risk because some back end development (define databases etc) and some front end development can be under way by the time the real heavy lifting starts.