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What Is a Toggle?

A toggle is a switch that can be set in two states: on and off. In web design, toggles are often used to hide content. Toggle buttons are usually accompanied by text that tells users which option they’re currently using. They can also be displayed as an image or icon. Some users rely on visual cues to identify the toggle’s state, so it’s important to choose a color that makes sense for your audience.

The word toggle comes from the verb “to shift,” which means to move or change from one position to another. The original meaning of the word was related to pulling on a rope or chain. Later, the word came to mean pulling a lever or handle to shift a position. The word has also been used to describe a pin or rod that is moved transversely through a hole, eye, or loop in a chain or rope, or to fasten a toggle rail or bar to a frame.

In a technical context, the word toggle has become popular to refer to a feature that allows a system operator to control whether an application’s code is running in production mode or in testing mode. This type of feature is commonly used to enable continuous deployment. For example, when Etsy rolled out a new version of their news feed in September 2015 they first pushed the update to a small percentage of users behind a toggle so that they could observe its performance and make necessary adjustments before rolling it out to the entire user base.

Some teams manage their toggle configuration in static files – a simple commenting approach or the use of a preprocessor’s #ifdef function, for example. This is a fine way to manage toggles for a small number of releases but it gets difficult at scale. In such cases, it’s often necessary to build-out a centralized toggle configuration management UI.

Toggle configuration in a central DB can make testing and validation much more robust. It also reduces the need to re-deploy a release in order to flip a toggle which can be a significant drain on a CI/CD workflow.

A final point to consider is that the toggle’s on/off state should be reflected by the text label. Some designers have chosen to do this by using a color for the on/off state, but this can cause problems with accessibility. For example, many users with red/green colorblindness have difficulty distinguishing red from green. Additionally, it’s important to consider the societal and cultural implications of using particular colors for on/off states.

Finally, it’s a good idea to test both the toggle configuration that will eventually be deployed to production and the fallback toggle configuration with all toggles flipped Off. This will help to prevent a regression in future releases and should be part of any quality assurance process. To further improve quality, many teams also test a few tests with all toggles flipped On in order to verify that the transition from Off to On is smooth and seamless.