A toggle is a button or switch that allows users to choose between two opposing options. Toggles are commonly used in technology, computing and programming to help people manage the settings or modes for an application. When a toggle is activated, it switches to one option and when it is deactivated, it switches back to the original state. Toggles are useful because they help people manage complex and extensive features and provide them with clear and concise ways to make choices.
Toggles can be found in various everyday technologies and applications, including computers, smartphones, cars, tablets, TVs and digital cameras. They are often placed in a prominent location in the user interface and can be easily identified by their icon and label. Toggle icons should always be clear and consistent with their function and should utilize visual cues to communicate their states, such as movement and color. The color of a toggle should be chosen carefully, as it can affect the user’s perception of its functionality. For example, using red for the on position can be confusing for users who associate it with stop signs or traffic signals. Toggles are also frequently used in responsive design to allow users to control the display of navigation and sidebars. In addition to allowing for the flexibility of responsive content, toggles can be used to enable or disable specific elements in accordance with the device that the viewer is using.
When applied to software development, toggles support newer agile approaches and can be a valuable tool for companies looking to increase their speed of delivery without sacrificing quality. Instead of creating a code branch for each feature that the team is writing, they can use a release toggle to hide their changes until they are ready for QA, market testing or another stage in the development process. Using this technique allows the teams to meet their delivery targets without putting new features into production until they are ready for them.
A savvy team will never have more than a handful of toggles in their production codebase at any time, and they will remove them as soon as they are no longer required. This will prevent them from becoming an ongoing source of maintenance, bug reports and performance lags. Some teams even put “expiration dates” on their toggles to encourage them to clean them up quickly.
If the toggle is in the frontend, consider hiding it behind a header or query parameter so that it does not require a database call each time it is activated. This can dramatically reduce the load on production servers and significantly improve performance. For this reason, it is important to consider the implications of adding a toggle for a bug fix on a case-by-case basis. In some cases, it may not be necessary and the bug may end up worsening if the toggle is created. In other cases, the benefit of a toggle can be outweighed by the increased maintenance and performance costs that come with it.
