Toggle is a switch that can be turned on or off. It’s used in technology, computing, programming, and communications to enable users to change between different settings and options. Toggles are often shaped like buttons and can have a clear interface icon to communicate their state. They can also be updated in some cases by changing the background—for example, making the toggle appear opaque or transparent—when they’re in a specific state.
Feature toggles can be triggered by a variety of conditions, including fitness test results from other features in the codebase, a setting in a feature management tool, or a config file. They’re generally intended to be short-lived, although product-centric toggles may need to stick around for longer periods. As a result, they’re valuable when your team is applying newer agile development processes to their work, because they help you roll out and back features in quick cycles.
In the context of web applications, toggles are commonly found as part of form elements, such as the
Toggles have a number of technical limitations, particularly when they’re used to hide articles and content from viewers. For example, you cannot use toggles to hide the content in a world’s map or article preview. Additionally, it’s not possible to hide sections or items with a visibility toggle that’s linked to any kind of dynamic content, such as mention links, which will continue to display even when the toggle is switched off.
While there are many ways to implement toggles in the context of an application, some best practices apply broadly. For instance, you should clearly identify the setting, view, or content a toggle affects, so that people understand what they’re turning on or off. Using high-contrast colors and evaluating societal and cultural implications can help with this, as well.
You should also give each toggle a name that gives some useful information about the feature and its purpose. This helps someone on any team—including you, the developer, who might encounter it in a debugging session—understand what it does and its role in your application. This can help you avoid misconfiguration or accidental activation of an undesirable feature. Finally, you should use a standard visual design for your toggles so that they look consistent across the application. This makes it easier for your team to create and maintain them. Having an appropriate default value for the toggle is also helpful. This default can be the default value of an element in your application, or a neutral or informative text string. This way, you can prevent people from accidentally pressing a toggle that they don’t intend to activate or understand the impact of doing so. This can lead to confusion and frustration for users. In addition, you should provide the user with an explanation of the default value when they click the toggle, to alleviate any confusion about its function.
