Toggle is a user interface control that allows users to quickly update their preferences, settings and other types of information. It’s a great alternative to checkboxes and radio buttons. However, like all UI controls it’s important to use toggles sparingly and always with care.

Toggles have many benefits when used well, including allowing teams to easily test different variants of an experience. However, a toggle can be confusing for users if used incorrectly. It’s crucial to consider cognitive issues when designing a toggle and to ensure that the toggle is consistent throughout an application to minimize friction.

Typically, toggles appear in the corner of an element and can be clicked to switch between its two states (On and Off). This allows teams to easily test new variants of a feature without having to rebuild the entire page. A toggle can also be a powerful way to help users navigate long pages by collapsing or expanding sections of the content when they are not needed.

While this flexibility is beneficial, there are several cognitive problems with using toggles. For example, toggles can be hard for users to interpret because they have no empty state and don’t follow standard visual conventions, such as positioning them above or below other UI elements. Additionally, toggles rely on color to communicate their state which can be problematic for users with color blindness or low vision. To avoid these issues, toggles should be clearly labelled and should never rely on color alone to convey meaning.

In addition to the cognitive issues associated with toggles, they can also be a complex and resource intensive type of UI control. For this reason, they are best suited for scenarios where a team needs to disable an existing or legacy feature but doesn’t want to change the codebase. For instance, a company may want to run an A/B test on its product configurator and add an experiment toggle to split users into groups with and without algorithm B. Once the A/B test is complete and the team has conclusive data that algorithm B performs better, the company can remove the experiment toggle and make algorithm B live for all users.

Another useful use of toggles is to enable premium features for users when they upgrade their account. These features are typically locked behind a paywall and can be enabled or disabled with permission toggles. These toggles are usually only active for a few days or weeks and then retired once they’ve been deployed to production without any issues.

A final consideration when using toggles is that they should be transitionary by nature. They should be used strategically and then pruned once they’ve reached the end of their lifecycle. Leaving old toggles in place increases the risk of bugs and regressions when they are suddenly re-activated and users expect a different behavior. To avoid this, it’s often a good idea to include a process for vetting whether a toggle should be removed in the product management workflow or by adding an automatic code cleanup step to your release cycle.