The Toggle is a digital trade journal exploring the critical role technology plays in businesses and organizations across industries, and the men and women who make it happen. From data privacy and cybersecurity to cloud solutions and artificial intelligence, Toggle showcases how today’s most innovative companies manage their complex, ever-evolving technology landscape.
A toggle is a switch that can be either on or off. In software, toggles are used to allow users to choose between different modes or states. Toggles are a common feature in many technologies and are often used in conjunction with other features, such as checkboxes or radio buttons. For example, a video chat application may use a toggle to let users switch between two cameras at once.
In software, toggles can be implemented with a variety of techniques, from simple “if” statements to decision trees that act upon a wide array of conditions. These conditions can be anything from a fitness test result, to a setting in a feature management tool, to a variable provided by a config file.
One of the main uses of toggles is to support newer agile development processes, such as lean and incremental delivery. Using toggles, a dev team can hide new functionality while it is being developed and tested, and then enable the feature once it has been approved. This allows developers to release updates quickly and meet business requirements without having to wait for a longer cycle like a traditional code branch.
Another important use of toggles is to perform multivariate or A/B testing. By running tests with different cohorts of users, a company can compare the results and decide which features to push into production. This is commonly used to change things like the purchase flow of an ecommerce system, or even the Call To Action wording on a button.
Toggle switches are an essential tool in the modern developer’s arsenal, and can be used to solve a wide range of problems. However, they must be deployed strategically and used wisely. A key consideration is that they can create additional management overhead. Savvy teams view toggles as inventory with a carrying cost and seek to keep their stock low by pruning old toggles from the codebase as soon as they are no longer needed. To do this, they may add a toggle removal task to their backlog or build it into their feature management tools.
It is also important to consider the cognitive impact of using toggles. For example, relying on colors to convey the state of a toggle can be confusing and misleading for users who are color blind or have other sensory disabilities. To avoid this, designers should use alternative controls such as checkboxes or radio buttons when possible.
