A toggle is a simple button that can be flipped to change its state. Often, toggles are used to enable or disable elements within an article or web page. Toggles have been widely adopted by designers and developers for a variety of applications.

The word Toggle comes from the phrase “to turn on, off, or adjust.” When used with web pages and other online applications, toggles allow designers to create interactive features that are both engaging and easy for users to control.

There are many ways to implement toggles, ranging from a simple if/else statement to more complex decision trees that can be triggered by various conditions. A wide range of variables can be used to determine whether a toggle is flipped on or off, including fitness test results from other features in the codebase, a setting in a feature management platform, or even a user-specific property retrieved from a database.

Operation Toggles are usually short-lived, only active for a few days or weeks until a new product feature is launched with no issues and then retired. However, sometimes they can be semi-permanent, such as when a website experiences heavy traffic and needs to temporarily disable non-essential features to avoid causing additional latency.

Dev Toggles support the use of agile development processes by allowing teams to deploy software while they are working on new features. Traditionally, these features would be written on code branches and then merged into trunk code, but with toggles they can be released directly into production without requiring the feature to be fully developed or tested.

Visibility Toggles are often used for feature products that require a subscription. In this case, it’s important that users are able to easily switch between the free and premium versions of an application. To help with this, designers usually color the toggle buttons to make it more obvious for users to see which option they are selecting.

Some designers also add a small icon to the toggle button to further differentiate between options. However, it’s not a good idea to add an image to a toggle button, as this can cause accessibility problems for users with visual impairments, especially those with color blindness.

A popular alternative to toggles is using HTML snippets (ol> and ul>) to transform standard ordered and unordered lists into expandable or collapsible sections. This approach is lightweight, allows for flexible content layout and can be easily implemented with any article editor. However, it’s not an ideal solution for articles with a large amount of content, as the snippet requires additional markup to display multiple levels of nested lists.

Using a feature flag system like Kameleoon can simplify the process of implementing toggles by allowing your team to query an outside data source for configuration information and then triggering those functions at runtime without the need for code deployment. Savvy teams view their inventory of Feature Toggles as carrying a cost and seek to keep that inventory low by being proactive in sending out PRs to remove toggles once they have completed their intended lifecycle.