The toggle button is the preferred control for changing settings and preferences in mobile applications because it takes up less screen real estate than a radio button or checkbox. It also has a pre-selected default state (ON or OFF) which allows users to quickly and easily select an option.
Toggles are also very useful for experimenting with different designs and configurations of an application before rolling them out to the entire user base. For example, you can hide a new navigation bar feature in a prototype with a toggle until it has been thoroughly tested and vetted by a sample group of users before being rolled out to everyone.
Using a toggle to test whether a new design or flow is effective can save time and money by not having to implement the full product right away. This approach can also help prevent a potentially disastrous release with a feature that doesn’t resonate with users.
It’s important to use toggles sparingly, especially when they’re a substitute for other types of controls. For example, you shouldn’t rely on toggles to replace a submit button in a form because it may cause user confusion if the process of saving and confirming changes isn’t immediately apparent. Toggles are also not the best control for long forms where other types of fields are already present and the user is required to hit a Save or Confirm button for any changes to take effect.
Another thing to keep in mind is that if a toggle is dynamic, every time it’s used it will require a database call for its current value. This can add up to thousands or millions of queries over time for a rarely changing value. Consequently, it’s good practice to limit the number of toggles that exist in production and to clean up old toggles promptly as soon as they are no longer needed.
Toggles also support newer agile development models by allowing your team to roll out software even when you’re still working on features. Traditionally, such features would be created on code branches and merged into trunk in the course of a lengthy QA and testing process. Using toggles to enable and disable new functionality can shorten the cycle to release a feature by months and can make the transition between development versions much smoother.
Toggle configuration lives side-by-side in source control so we can track changes to the toggle and easily restore previous releases. This approach is a significant improvement over more traditional waterfall development methodologies that often require a rewrite of the app in order to revert changes made by earlier releases. Toggle configuration is also easier to maintain and debug compared to code rewrites.
