A toggle is a piece of metal or plastic that’s pushed through a hole in something, like a coat or bag, to fasten it. It’s also a term used to describe a feature or setting that can be turned on or off, like a notification or a screen overlay in a game or app.
A Toggle can also be an element that allows users to adjust settings or features, such as a Collapsible Toggle (which is used for things like article content layout and navigation), a Slideshow or Video Toggle, or any other type of switch that’s pushed in a specific direction. A Toggle can be styled and positioned to match the look and feel of the site or app where it’s being used, but most importantly, a Toggle is an abstraction that gives us control over how the user interacts with an application.
Toggles are a key component in Continuous Deployment practices, giving product teams the ability to test new functionality in a small segment of their user base before rolling it out more broadly. They can also serve as circuit breakers during high latency periods by temporarily disabling non-essential features for a short period of time.
In addition to allowing experimentation with new features Toggles are also useful for testing changes to existing code and functionality in production. With a toggle on, each user of the application will be sent down one or the other of two codepaths, and by tracking the behavior of the different cohorts we can make data-driven optimizations to things like the purchase flow of an ecommerce system, the wording on Call To Action buttons, or any other feature where we want to see what impact an incremental change will have on user behavior.
Another use of Toggles is to enable features for paying customers only, such as advanced analytics or email notifications. These can be enabled/disabled using a Toggle and are activated when the customer clicks on an icon in their app or on the website.
While toggles can be a good solution for quickly configuring an app or site, there are also many times where they’re not appropriate. For example, if an article has a lot of text and is long, a collapsible content element or accordion might be better to use because they allow visitors to easily find the parts of the page that are relevant to them, and minimize scrolling. Additionally, toggles can sometimes cause cognitive issues for users because they don’t always clearly convey the current state – for example, in the above image, if you’re used to seeing the “cookies” label on the right side of the toggle, it can be confusing when the toggle is flipped to the left.
In general, there are a few ways to create a Toggle, from hardcoding it into the code through an approach that uses a preprocessor’s #ifdef functionality to more dynamically managing the toggle configuration through a Toggles API. All of these approaches have their pros and cons, but whatever method you choose should provide a flexible and reliable way for developers to manage the Toggle’s current state across multiple environments.
