Report from BADCamp 2012 Views Usability Testing

This is terrific work and exactly the sort of the thing the Drupal community should do when adding massive bits of functionality like Views to Core. Huge props to everyone involved in this.

I've been using Views for ages now and I still run into some of these from time to time. But the worst -- by far -- is the labels on by default. I find if I add anything more than 2-3 fields at one time, I miss turning off at least one of the labels.

Other thoughts:

a. Learning Views, I remember being somewhat confused by "Theme: Information", and then pleasantly surprised upon learning that it has some really useful stuff in it.

Actually, "not knowing how something works and then being pleasantly surprised by its usefulness" is a pretty recurring theme in my Views education, now that I think about it...

b. I frequently forget to change the context of a change ("overridden" / "not overridden"), which changes the context of everything else, making me unsure of what is now overridden and what is now not. If I notice I've done that, I'll often just click "Cancel" and redo whatever I'd done all over again, in order to prevent breaking some other display.

c. Nomenclature has never really been the strong suit of the CTools family -- see, for instance, "Panels Content Type" vs. "Pane" vs. "Panel" vs. "Content Type". All are unique, but could be interpreted as synonymous (The first is the kinds of content you add to Panels, the second is a piece of content added to a Panels layout, a Panel is a layout structure, and the third is completely unrelated and instead has to do with the Field API.). "Contextual filters" really confused me at first -- "arguments" seems to make more sense, but that conflicts somewhat with Panels arguments (Which itself is different from -- yet similar to -- a Panels context, which itself is completely unrelated to the Contexts module, I think.). Confused yet?

The CTools family is such an important part of high-end Drupal development -- as elements like Views are added to core, I think it would be a fairly good idea to collectively sort this all out before a whole new wave of users becomes accustomed to CTools', um, "unique" vocabulary.

d. That all said, I do like how quickly I can build something in Views and how streamlined that experience is. Please, don't replace it with a trillion wizards (Or, if you do, at least let there be a "Developer View" or something that's streamlined)!