A toggle is a user interface component that helps people manage the state of something, typically a view or piece of content. Toggles have two opposing states — on and off — and let users manage the state of something by moving between them. They’re very useful in letting users update preferences, settings or other types of data. Toggles are best used when the toggle’s current state will immediately impact a user’s experience. They should be easy to understand, clear, and deliver a concrete result.
Many users rely on visual cues to understand the current state of a toggle. Designers commonly use colors to help distinguish the state — red for on, green for off. While this is generally a good thing, it can cause cognitive issues for some users if the color doesn’t make sense or doesn’t match a common mental model of the world. The choice of a color for a toggle can also be problematic when a design team doesn’t consider societal and cultural differences. For example, the use of red for on may be counterintuitive to a group of users who see red on traffic signals and stop signs.
Another problem with the visual cues used to represent toggle states is that they don’t work well for screen readers and other assistive technologies. For this reason, the most accessible toggles look like sliders and utilize visual cues that move as the toggle changes state – not just a fixed color or text.
Toggle is an extremely powerful user interface tool, but it can be a slippery slope when not managed correctly. If users are confused or frustrated with a toggle’s current state it can affect how they interact with the site or app, leading to poor usability and abandonment.
In order to avoid this, designers should avoid overusing the toggle and always make sure that they are putting them in the right place. For instance, if a toggle is intended to prevent the collection of certain user data then it should be placed in a place where the users can’t accidentally enable or disable cookies. Similarly, if a toggle is designed to prevent an action that will negatively impact the user, such as blocking them from buying something, then it should be placed in a place that makes it clear what their current state is and what the implications of switching the toggle are.
One of the most important rules when designing a toggle is to keep it as small as possible. Creating a series of complex toggles can be confusing for the user and frustrating for teams to debug weeks or months down the line. It is often tempting to turn a large swath of code into a toggle, but this will usually cause more problems than it solves.
Feature toggles are a great way to perform A/B or multivariate testing without impacting the entire production system. By creating a toggling rule that will consistently send a cohort down one codepath or the other, we can measure how much of an impact the change has on our users and decide what to roll out next. This is a much more agile alternative to the traditional waterfall development process that would require putting features in a separate branch of code before they could be tested and rolled out to users.
