Toggle is a feature that allows users to switch between different settings or modes. They are commonly used in technology, computing, programming, and communications devices to enable or disable features.
In software applications, toggles are often implemented as a way to support responsive designs. By using toggles, developers can easily enable or disable the functionality of different UI components based on user device and screen size. This allows developers to provide a better experience for their users without having to modify the application’s source code or depend on third-party libraries and APIs.
Toggles can also be used as a form of multivariate or A/B testing. Each toggle can be configured with a different set of test scenarios that are executed at runtime, bucketing users into one or another cohort. The toggle router will then consistently send each user down one of the test codepaths. By tracking the aggregate behavior of each cohort, it is possible to make data-driven optimizations to things like the purchase flow of an ecommerce system or the Call To Action wording on a button.
Whether they are being used for experimentation or as circuit breakers in your production application, toggles are an effective tool to help you manage complexity and maintain stability. By allowing you to control features at a granular level, toggles allow you to quickly roll out or rollback changes that might be impacting performance. This is especially important when you’re dealing with high-latency periods that might affect large numbers of users.
A common use of toggles is to implement a light or dark theme in an application. This is especially useful when the user has a preference for which type of theme they prefer to use, whether it be for readability or aesthetics.
Another benefit of toggles is their ability to be updated without having to deploy new code. Typically, you’ll want to manage your toggle configuration in some sort of centralized source, such as an application DB or some type of server-side configuration store. This makes it easy to keep track of the state of all your toggles, as well as update their configuration without having to perform a code deployment.
While there are many ways to create a toggle, it is important to choose a clear label that clearly describes what the toggle will do when activated. It is also recommended to limit the number of words in a label, as more words can confuse users and make it harder for them to find the toggle they need. Lastly, it is important to avoid using toggles in forms where the user needs to click Save or Confirm for their changes to take effect. Instead, it is a good idea to replace these types of forms with a simple checkbox.
In addition to visibility toggles, Kameleoon also supports secrets and subscriber containers. Secrets allow you to hide content from certain subscribers, while subscriber containers allow you to reveal hidden content to specific groups of users.
