A toggle is a button that can be clicked to change its state from one to another. These buttons are often found in technology, computing, programming and communications devices and software applications to allow users to switch between different modes or settings. They are commonly used as “on/off” switches.
Toggles are an effective way to help users quickly choose between two options or states. They provide clear visual cues of movement and color that help avoid confusion when a user is selecting a toggle state. Toggles can be used on individual elements or in whole pages of content to help visitors navigate and read information quickly.
Collapsible toggles and accordions are great tools for structuring long page articles to help minimize scrolling and make it easy for visitors to find content that is relevant to them. Toggles can be used in conjunction with other navigation and layout tools to provide an optimal user experience on any device.
Experiment toggles are a useful tool to have when you’re experimenting with workflows, features or product experiences. With an experiment toggle you can send different groups of users down different codepaths and analyze the results to see which option or flow works best.
When implementing a feature toggle it’s important to consider how your team will handle the ongoing maintenance of the toggle. How you handle this will determine whether it’s a valuable asset or a liability. Ideally, you want to keep the toggle configuration in version control with the rest of your code base so that it’s easy to revert back to an earlier release should you need to.
In addition to keeping your feature toggle configuration in version control, it’s also important that you create a process for removing outdated toggles so that your team doesn’t end up with an endless number of feature flags that are no longer required. Savvy teams view these as inventory that comes with a carrying cost and will regularly work to remove obsolete toggles from their release cycles. Some even put “expiration dates” on their feature flags that will fail a build or even refuse to start the application if the toggle is still present after its expiration date.
Designing a good toggle takes a lot of thought and careful attention. Especially because toggles don’t contain the text “on” or “off”. Instead they rely on other visual clues to convey their states to the user. Choosing the right visual clues is not as simple as it may seem and can have a major impact on the success of your toggle.
Using the wrong visual cues can cause users to incorrectly select a toggle state resulting in confusion, frustration and potentially error. This is often caused by using inverted toggles that reverse the direction of the switch to confuse the user’s natural instinct to click the button that matches the desired state. Inverted toggles perform worse than non-inverted toggles and should be avoided if possible.
