A toggle is a switch that can be flipped on or off to allow the user to manage a feature or mode. It is commonly used in everyday technology, computing and programming to give users a way to easily switch between different modes, states or options.
Toggles are a useful tool for managing Features and can be a great solution when it comes to quickly changing the configuration of an application or website without requiring a full deployment cycle. However, like any tool they can be misused or misunderstood. When implemented poorly toggles can create cognitive friction and negatively impact the experience of your users. In this article we’ll explore best practices for using Toggles, and provide some tips on how to make them more effective and user-friendly.
A common place to use a toggle is on a button to control the visibility of an article or section of content in your website. In this case the toggle allows you to hide or show content for logged-in users while leaving it visible to un-logged in visitors.
While this is a simple use of a toggle it can be confusing for some users. Especially when the toggle looks identical to other buttons online and only uses color to distinguish its state, this can cause confusion for users with red/green color blindness.
Another use of toggles is in software applications to enable or disable features based on user permissions or role. These are often referred to as Champagne Brunch or Permissioning Toggles and tend to be longer lived than other categories of Feature Toggles.
In many cases it’s more useful to manage these type of longer-lived toggles with a centralized solution rather than with static files. This can reduce the amount of manual work required to change the toggle configuration of your product, and also help in ensuring consistency across a fleet of servers. A common approach to this is to move Toggle Configuration into some type of centralized store, usually an existing application DB. Combined with the build out of some form of admin UI to help system operators, testers and product managers access and modify the Toggle Configuration this provides a much more efficient way of managing your feature toggles.
It’s important to keep in mind that a toggle is just a piece of code, so you should always be strategic about how and where you use it. It is important to deploy a toggle when it is necessary, but also make sure that there is a process in place to vet whether a toggle is the best solution for a given problem and also to remove it as soon as its lifecycle has run out.
Finally, it is important to consider how your users will interact with the toggle, as this will influence the underlying architecture of your program. For example, if you deploy your toggle as part of an endpoint which allows for dynamic in-memory re-configuration then your testing processes will likely be impacted by the need to restart the process when switching between a Toggle On and Off. This can be mitigated by deploying your toggles as part of an automated test suite which is run on every change to your CI/CD pipeline.
