The Toggle is a simple and powerful design pattern that helps people manage the state of a product. It can be used for things like changing a privacy setting or turning on and off features in a product. Toggles are often preferred over radio buttons or checkboxes because they don’t require a Save or Confirm button for changes to take effect. But, toggles can also be confusing if not designed well. This is particularly true if you’re using colors to represent the different states of a toggle and if your users don’t all have color vision deficiency (8% of men do).
Usually, toggles are accompanied by a description or icon to make it clear what each state means. In addition to the visual indicator, you should always make sure your toggles are accessible. Sadly, many toggles aren’t. Some developers and designers aren’t familiar with accessibility best practices so they copy some toggle code off the internet. And, the result is a toggle that is inaccessible to people who use screen readers or other assistive technologies.
A Toggle can be used for both hardware and software. For instance, the Caps Lock and Num Lock keys on a keyboard are toggle switches that turn on or off particular functions in the computer. This same concept is present in the options menus of most programs that allow users to switch on or off specific functionality. Similarly, the toggle switch in Facebook’s settings allows you to opt-in or out of cookies.
Toggles can be either static or dynamic. For example, a Canary Release Toggle is likely to be long-lived and semi-permanent while a Permissioning Toggle might have to be decided on a request by request basis. Toggles that are less long-lived but still semi-permanent can be configured using a static approach where the toggle configuration is hardcoded in the codebase.
A more dynamic approach is to use a dynamic toggle, where the toggle’s state is decided on a request-by-request basis. For this type of toggle, a tool is required that can synchronize the state of the toggle with the code that needs to decide which path the user should take. Toggle Router is one such tool.
Another advantage of the Toggle Router is that it can be used to perform multivariate or A/B testing. Each cohort of users is sent down one of two codepaths via the Toggle Router and at runtime we can measure the impact of each on user behavior. This can be a great way to make data-driven improvements to something like the purchase flow of an ecommerce system or the Call To Action wording on a button. The Toggle Router can be made even more robust and accurate by using it in conjunction with a Permissioning Toggle. This will ensure that the same group of users is consistently sent down the correct codepath and that the results can be reliably compared across cohorts. This is a key feature that separates the Toggle Router from more generic toggle tools.
