Desktop environment · System UI
Windows 11 system dock & ambient widgets
A dock for Windows 10 and 11 that puts app launching, running windows, system state and small widgets on one surface you can read at a glance. I built it because checking the time, a timer, the battery or what was playing meant opening a different flyout each time, and the dock replacements I tried needed administrator rights or broke when Explorer updated.
- Lead designer & developer
- Solo
- Independent · 2026
- Released & open source
01The problem
On Windows 11, checking the battery, a timer, what is playing or how hard the machine is working means opening a separate flyout, tray or app each time. The dock replacements that consolidate this usually modify the shell itself: they need administrator rights, break when Explorer updates, and can leave the desktop unusable when they crash. The design question was how much state a dock can carry while still being something you glance at rather than operate, without taking any risk with the operating system.
02Research & rationale
I did not run a study for DockHub. The design leans on existing work on calm technology and peripheral displays (Weiser & Brown, 1996; Matthews et al., 2004), which argues that ambient information should be readable in the periphery and move to the centre of attention only when it needs to. That gave every widget one rule to pass: its main value must be readable without opening it. I also looked at why existing docks break, which is almost always because they replace or patch Explorer, and made staying out of the shell a hard constraint rather than a feature.
03Iterations
A horizontal dock with a widget rail
The first layout put apps and a row of widgets on one strip. Each widget shows one number or state in large type with a colour cue (green for battery and hydration, orange for timers, blue for weather), and opens into a detailed panel on click without taking focus from the window you were in.
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A vertical mode for wide monitors
On an ultrawide monitor a bottom dock spends the scarcest space, height. I added left and right edge modes where widgets collapse into compact tiles and expand into drawers on demand. This came from my own setup, not from testing with others.
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Staying out of the shell
Pinning happens through an Explorer context menu entry ('Pin to DockHub'). The native taskbar is hidden, never removed, and a watchdog restores it if DockHub exits or crashes, so trying DockHub can never leave someone without a working desktop.
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04Screens
05Result
DockHub is released and open source. What I can honestly claim is narrow: it gathers the checks I used to make across several flyouts into one glance, and it has never left my desktop in a broken state. Whether it reduces interruptions for other people is untested, and it is one of the questions I want to study properly.
- C#
- .NET 8
- WPF
- Win32 API
06Limitations
- Tested only by me, on my own hardware and monitor setups.
- No measurement of how often or how long people look at the dock, so 'glanceable' is a design goal here, not a result.
- The colour cues rely on hue alone; I have not checked them against colour-vision deficiencies.
07What I would do differently
If I started again I would test glanceability before building widgets: show people a still of the dock for half a second and ask what the battery level or the timer was. That five-minute test would have told me which widgets actually read at a glance, and it was cheap enough to run on day one.
08References
- Weiser, M., & Brown, J. S. (1996). Designing calm technology. PowerGrid Journal, 1(1).
- Matthews, T., Dey, A. K., Mankoff, J., Carter, S., & Rattenbury, T. (2004). A toolkit for managing user attention in peripheral displays. Proceedings of UIST 2004. ACM. doi:10.1145/1029632.1029676