Can I create a custom interface to power views search? My content is well structured from an internal point of view, but I want to provide a more customer-focussed front-end to an advanced search form.

e.g. I want to offer a list of check boxes like

Show:
[ ] All
[X] Articles
[X] Yellow things
[ ] Super cheap things


I would then intercept this data and mangle it, so for example Article might become a parameter to node_type but Yellow things might be changed into node_type = things AND field_colour = 'yellow' while Super cheap things might be a different thing again.

i.e. I'd like to have a parameterised view set up but use my own customer-focussed forms, rather than use Views' own data-focussed exposed forms.

Is this straight forward?

(More info: I'm on Drupal 7.x. I'm very comfortable with PHP and SQL but I'm keen to do things the Drupal Way unless it's ridiculously inefficient)
Write a custom views_handler_filter. See Views' API for a step by step introduction to implementing handler classes for Views.