Views is a super-powerful way to use all of your Drupal data in multiple ways. But it gets complicated quickly. So I of course had to attend the session at Drupal Camp Twin Cities 2011 on “The new Views user interface: How it works and how it was made,” led by David Rothstein.

The session description was:

Recently, the Drupal 7 version of the Views module got an entirely new user interface, thanks to a months-long partnership between designers and engineers working for Drupal Gardens and major Views contributors from the rest of the Drupal community. Working together, we revamped almost every part of the interface, with the goal of exposing the most common functionality in easy-to-use "wizards" while still preserving the full power of the module for advanced users. The result is a totally new experience for site builders who are using Views to build sites in Drupal 7.

• Go over the new Views interface and demonstrate how to use it, as well as give some background on the process by which it was made.
• Discuss the interface from the perspective of new usability patterns introduced in Drupal 7 core (highlighting places where it follows those patterns and places where it creates new ones), which should be useful for anyone interested in making usability improvements to other Drupal 7 contributed modules.
• Talk about lessons learned from the process of doing a design-driven overhaul of an extremely popular Drupal module.

Here are my notes: