A toggle is a switch with two positions: on and off. Toggles are a common user-interface element that allow users to update their preferences, settings or other types of information. When designing a toggle, it’s important to consider the context in which it will be used and the potential impact on user experience. It’s also important to choose appropriate visual signifiers for the toggle state and to evaluate societal or cultural implications when choosing colors for those signifiers.
Toggles are a powerful tool for making data-driven decisions about how a software system should behave. For example, suppose a product team wants to test the effect of two different call to action wordings on conversions within an ecommerce checkout flow. They could create an experiment toggle to split users into two cohorts at runtime and have the system consistently send each of them down one codepath or the other. The team can then measure the conversion rate of each cohort and determine which call to action wording is more effective. After the experiment is complete, the team can simply remove the experiment toggle and deploy the winning codepath to production.
Feature Toggles are often implemented as part of a larger feature management system in order to support dev teams as they write new features. They can be any kind of feature flag, from a simple “if” statement through to complex decision trees that act upon many different variables. Generally speaking the determining factor for whether a toggle is flipped on or off will be based upon fitness test results from other features in the codebase, a setting in a feature management system, or some other sort of data-driven condition.
When implementing a Toggle it is important to consider the UI impact that it may have, particularly for users with less computer experience. Using high contrast colors to signal state changes can help, and it’s a good idea to include a clear description of the state in question (e.g. On or Off). It’s also a good idea to avoid using the same color for both states, as this can cause confusion.
Another consideration for a Toggle is the impact that it has on a software release cycle. If a toggle is managed via static files then the modification of those files can be quite fiddly and can increase the overall development and testing time. For this reason, most organizations opt to move Toggle configuration into a central store, typically an existing application DB. This can be a much more efficient approach as it means there is no need to re-deploy the entire release in order to change the state of a toggle. However, this does tend to add a lot of complexity and may require a change to the underlying architecture.
