The word toggle is a noun and is defined as “a switch having two positions, one of which is on, the other of which is off.” In the context of software development, a toggle can refer to any control that allows users to select from two or more options. This control can be activated by clicking or pressing on it to change its state. Toggles are commonly found in everyday technology devices and applications where users can adjust settings and modes.
When used in a Web application, toggles can help improve accessibility by minimizing scrolling. When positioned correctly on a page, toggles can also allow visitors to view more of an article at once by collapsing content areas such as sidebars and navigation menus. Using toggles for these purposes requires careful consideration and design though, as they can often end up overwhelming or confusing users.
In order to understand what makes a toggle button effective, it’s important to consider the psychology of how users interact with it. Unlike radio buttons, which are typically presented with a label on both sides, toggle buttons have no explicit text to tell users what they are clicking. Instead, they rely on other visual cues like size and positioning to determine what they’re doing.
The use of toggles is common in ecommerce and other product areas where different configuration options are available to customers. A common example is the choice of shipping methods during checkout. This feature is typically offered by a number of vendors and can be switched on or off depending on the customer’s preference. Similarly, many ecommerce sites offer the option to toggle cookies on or off in order to optimize user experience.
Feature Toggles are also commonly used in multivariate or A/B testing. By exposing an experiment as a toggle on a production system and segmenting users into cohorts, teams can make data-driven decisions about which codepaths to deploy. This can lead to things like ecommerce site configurators switching between two different suggestion algorithms. Once the team has conclusive data about which algorithm provides the best customer experience, they can remove the experiment toggle and push that algorithm into production.
Savvy teams treat their inventory of Feature Toggles as a resource that comes with a cost and try to keep the number of idle toggles as low as possible. This may be done by adding toggle removal tasks to the team’s backlog or by incorporating the process into the management platform. Some teams even go as far as to put expiration dates on their toggles, which will cause them to fail a test (or even crash the app!) if they haven’t been flipped in a specified amount of time. The more idle toggles your codebase has, the more overhead it places on your team so it’s important to be proactive about toggle removal.
