Toggle is a feature that allows a user to switch back and forth between two different settings or options generally by performing just one action. Toggles are common in everyday technology and are used to enable and disable various features or display modes. In web design, toggles are often implemented as a way to update preferences and settings based on screen size or device type. Toggle buttons are typically designed to look like sliders and use visual cues (i.e. movement and color) to help users differentiate between the two states.
In a broader sense, the word toggle can also be applied to the act of switching between two things, such as screens when video chatting with friends or navigating between different sections of an exhibit at a museum. Toggle describes the ability to move between different settings or perspectives and is a great metaphor for the way that technology plays such an important and vital role in our modern lives.
Unlike Checkboxes or Radio Buttons toggles don’t have a text “On/Off” label so they must rely on other visual clues to communicate their state to the user. This means it’s especially important for designers to think carefully about the nuances of how they use toggles to convey their meaning. Toggle buttons should always be clear and direct in their labels, avoid using ambiguous colors (such as red for On or off) and ensure that they are accessible to all users.
This is particularly important when creating a toggle that can be flipped at runtime as it could mean changing the configuration of specific service instances on a live production environment. The ability to do this at runtime is a powerful tool that can be leveraged for things such as Experiment Toggles and other data-driven optimizations but must be handled with care if the goal is to minimize any disruption to the user experience.
In these situations it’s usually best to implement a Toggle with an explicit toggle configuration that is baked into the release and can’t be altered (like a Canary or Champagne Brunch). That way teams can test how their system performs with both the current production toggle configuration and the fallback configuration of those toggles flipped off. This approach also helps to reduce the amount of time that is required to validate a new release as it’s often much faster to run an experiment than to re-deploy a new artifact into a testing environment and manually flip a toggle to its intended state.
As the name suggests, Toggle is a simple and convenient interface for changing and configuring feature flags. It’s an ideal solution for teams that require a lightweight yet powerful configuration management tool to manage their feature experimentation and can be used in conjunction with more advanced tools like Canary, Champagne Brunch and Permissioning Toggles. However, it’s not an ideal choice for the majority of feature flag management needs since it can be a source of confusion and frustration in a shared test environment when used incorrectly.
