I’ve talked about the Taskbar and how the changes in the action center affects it, but I haven’t showed you yet the Action Center I’ve designed.

In this design I’m focusing desktop users. From my own experience in my office and with my family I’ve noticed that they are reluctant to use any feature using the UI of Windows 8 for being to “weird” compared to the classic desktop one. This is why I’ve made a hybrid between the full screen panel designed for the good old Windows 8 and the panel design used in the calendar flyout in Windows 10.

Project panel (left) vs Calendar (right)

The new design

In desktop mode, the action center pops up as a flyout but as you scroll down, the panel grows to fit the height of the screen. I’ve also added the possibility to pin the action center to the right side of the screen for that crazy wide screens you kids like now a days. This is an early version, I’ll post updates on this in the future.

Expanding the action center using scroll

This way every action on the taskbar behaves similarly. No more distinction between features from Windows 10 (time and calendar) and features from Windows 8 (the connect panel or the project panel).

Keep in mind this design is for desktop. I’ll get to tablet mode in another article.

Quick Settings

This new design of the Action Center and Taskbar lets anything be an action and be pinned to any of them. But regardless of your settings, Quick Settings will always show the progress and devices panel and media controls for apps like Spotify or Groove.