A toggle is a switch that can be flipped between two different states. It is commonly used in technology, computing, programming, and communications to allow users to switch between different settings or options. Toggles are easy to use, require little user input and have clear visual signifiers of their current state.
While the toggle is a very useful and common element, there are some drawbacks to its use. If used in the wrong places, it can increase user frustration, slow down the application, or even cause the app to crash. It is also important to consider how users will interact with the toggle and whether it will provide them the desired results. In addition to these usability issues, it is also critical to consider how the toggle will be managed by developers. It should be kept in a safe place, and the team needs to have a process for cleaning up these toggles once they reach the end of their lifecycle.
Using Toggles for Testing
Toggles are an excellent tool for implementing continuous development and allowing your engineering team to experiment with new functionality with a subset of users before full rollout. This allows your team to see how a new feature will be received by your entire audience before it is released. This can reduce the risk of a new feature causing a large scale negative impact on your users or product.
Another great use of toggles is to allow for A/B tests on specific features in your software. This is often done by bucketing your users into groups and enabling a toggle for each group. This will then consistently send the cohorts down different code paths and measure their performance against each other. This can help you identify which features are the most effective at improving your software and make data-driven optimizations.
When deciding to create a toggle, it is important to keep the scope as small as possible. It can be tempting to create toggles that control large swaths of your product, but this will lead to confusion for the rest of your team and will likely be a nightmare to debug weeks or months down the road.
It is also important to name your toggles with meaningful names that tell something about the feature they control. This will allow someone on any team to understand the context in which a toggle was created and how long it has been around. This is especially helpful if the toggle is accidentally called from an error message or in a production environment.
Finally, it is important to remember that toggles are only useful when the user can immediately see the effect of pressing them. This is why it’s important to choose a color that has high contrast and to evaluate societal and cultural implications when choosing the toggle’s on/off states. In addition, it is best to avoid using toggles in areas of the page where other forms of input will be required or where there are delays such as system updates or network latency.
