A toggle is a switch that allows you to easily switch between two different states or options. Toggles can be found in everyday technology such as phones, computers, and software applications. They allow you to turn features on or off, switch between different display modes, or enable/disable certain settings.
Many companies use feature toggles in their continuous development workflows to experiment with new functionality and validate it with a subset of users before rolling it out to all customers. They can also be used to act as a circuit breaker during times of high load when the company wants to disable non-essential features in order to prevent outages for their users.
Toggles are great for supporting agile processes because you can hide new features behind a toggle while your engineering team works on them in code sprints. This is a much faster and more efficient alternative to creating a code branch and going through the traditional release, testing, and approval process that would be required with older waterfall development methodologies.
However, when a feature is toggled on it’s important that the label make clear to your users what will happen if they press it. Using vague language such as “on/off” can lead to confusion and even frustration, especially in complex applications that use toggles for multiple purposes. It’s also best to avoid confusing visual cues such as animation or color. These may seem like obvious and intuitive things to do but can be confusing for users that are unfamiliar with your interface.
Lastly, you should try to limit the scope of any given toggle as much as possible. It’s tempting to put large swaths of your application under the control of a series of toggles but this can quickly get out of hand and can be a nightmare to debug weeks or months down the line when the various toggles begin to interact with one another. Savvy teams often place a task on their backlog to remove any released toggles once they’re no longer needed. Others put “expiration dates” on their toggles so that a feature will be automatically removed from the production environment after an amount of time has passed.
It’s important to remember that toggle switches must be accessible to users with disabilities. It’s common for developers to use colors such as green or red in their toggles, but these can be very confusing for people with blindness and other disabilities that rely on visual cues to interpret their surroundings. It’s also best to avoid putting too much text into the toggle as this can also be a major pain point for people who have trouble with reading.
Finally, it’s important to understand that a toggle is a switch that can only have one of two states – on or off. That means that any state that is set to “on” cannot be “off” at the same time unless you are willing to have your users manually reset the toggle to “off”. This can be quite frustrating for them and could cause them to lose data or functionality that they had previously enabled when the toggle was “on”. It’s best to keep this in mind when designing your interfaces.
