Dock

Fieldwork puts a team's tools in one window. Its launcher was a grid nobody opened twice. They wanted something you find with your hand, not your eyes.

A dock that swells under the pointer does that: the tile you are heading for grows before you reach it, and its neighbours lean in so the row stays the same length.

Making it feel heavy enough. The first version tracked the pointer exactly and felt like a graph. Putting the magnification on a spring, so the row lags a few frames behind your hand, made it feel like an object.

Keyboard users get the same dock without the swell: focus moves tile to tile, the label appears above the focused one, and Enter opens it.