A toggle lets people manage the state of a view, setting, or piece of content. It’s important to use a consistent interface element for these toggles, like a button or a slider, to keep them easily accessible to all users. The toggle should also clearly identify the piece of content it controls with a clear label. The toggle should change visual appearance based on its state, for example using animation or color changes, to communicate this.

Often you can find examples of toggles on websites that implement the proximity principle, where you place the toggle close to the action it affects. This is a great way to increase the likelihood that people will interact with it, but be careful not to overuse this technique. It can reduce the clarity of your interface and lead to cognitive overload.

Another common use of toggles is to enable multivariate testing. You can then test different toggle configurations to see which ones are the most effective in achieving a goal such as increasing conversion rates or improving user experience.

The beauty of feature toggles is that they can be a valuable tool to support agile development practices. By letting teams deploy features while they are still in progress and then hiding them behind feature flags until they are ready for release or market testing, we can avoid the delay that would occur if we had to maintain these new features on separate code branches.

Toggle Configuration

In addition to the benefits of toggles as a mechanism for managing new feature deployments, they can also help with re-configuration of existing functionality in production environments. This is commonly done through an Ops Toggle that allows an ops team to manage a service instance in the background by switching it on and off as required.

Toggles are a powerful tool, but they can become a burden on your team if you allow them to accumulate in your codebase. Savvy teams keep their inventory of unused toggles to a minimum, adding a task to the backlog for each toggle that is introduced and making sure they are removed as soon as they’ve run their course.

You can often achieve the same effect as a feature toggle by hardcoding its state into static configuration files, but this approach is less dynamic and harder to manage at scale. Many teams prefer to move this kind of re-configuration into some sort of toggle management system for greater agility.

Toggle Testing

When a team is preparing to release a toggle to live production it’s best to test the expected result with all of its switches flipped On. This ensures that the toggle will be activated as intended and helps to prevent the unexpected impact of a bug or regression caused by an accidentally flipped off switch. Ideally these tests will also include a fallback configuration with all toggles flipped Off to catch any bugs that might only manifest when the toggle is active.