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How to Design a Toggle

A toggle is a control that allows users to select a state (e.g. ON or OFF). Toggles are preferred over radio buttons when changing settings because they take up less screen space. Toggle switches should have clear labels that clearly indicate the current state. It’s important to avoid relying solely on color to communicate state, as this can be counterintuitive to some audiences, particularly when a switch has an on or off state with no intermediary state. When designing toggles, consider whether a clear label is sufficient or if it would be helpful to provide a more descriptive, meaningful indication of the toggle’s current state, such as “Airplane Mode”.

The ability to toggle features can allow teams to test changes before releasing them to all users. Facebook, for example, uses Feature Toggles to perform continuous deployment and roll out new features to small segments of their user base before making them available to the entire user base. They are also used to quickly disable new features when they don’t perform well.

Toggle can be used to enable or disable all kinds of functionality in a system. For example, a toggle can be used to show or hide ratings and reviews on a business’s website. The ability to toggle reviews can help build trust with customers and increase engagement on the site.

A toggle can also be used to hide or display privacy policies on a website. This can be useful for businesses that want to demonstrate that they have a high level of privacy and security. It can also be helpful to ensure that the customer’s experience is consistent across all devices and browsers, regardless of how they are logged in to the site.

When designing toggles it’s important to keep in mind that they are intended to be used by people with varying levels of technical expertise. This means that the design should be easy to understand and use for those who aren’t familiar with the technology, as well as for those who are. The label should make it clear what will happen when the toggle is pressed, as well as how to undo any actions that are made.

In addition to the design of the interface for a toggle, it’s also important to think about how it will be managed in production. It’s common for teams to maintain a set of toggle configurations in static files. These are then re-deployed with each release of a product. While this is relatively simple for a small number of toggles it can become cumbersome once you reach a certain scale. It’s often better to move toggle configuration into some kind of centralized store, usually an existing application DB, so that it can be modified dynamically at runtime.

Finally, it’s wise for teams to test all of the toggle configurations that they expect to be live in production with their fallback configuration flipped On. This will help to prevent any unexpected regressions from being introduced into production as a result of changing a toggle configuration without properly testing the impact on the system.