In everyday technology, toggles are the switches that control things like WiFi or Bluetooth. In software applications, toggles allow users to update preferences and settings or to switch between different modes of operation. Using toggles in responsive design can help create a more intuitive and consistent user experience when responding to screen sizes or device type.
Toggles can be used to hide or display content. This is a useful technique for creating a responsive layout as it allows the author to control how much of an article’s content is displayed. In addition, this allows authors to present different views of the same content to visitors based on their preferences.
Collapsible toggles and accordions are an easy way to make long articles more user-friendly by allowing visitors to view or hide sections of the article based on their preferences. They can also be used to reduce scrolling in article pages and to make it easier for visitors to find content they want quickly.
When it comes to managing a toggle’s configuration there are a few different options, the most straightforward of which is the use of hardcoded comments or the preprocessor’s #ifdef feature. This approach can be quite simple but does not allow for dynamic re-configuration of a toggle and so it is usually only suitable for cases such as Ops Toggles where we are willing to manually deploy and redeploy code in order to change a flag’s state.
More sophisticated approaches to managing toggles include the use of a database and an API call. This type of solution can be more scalable but is often more complex and requires that we maintain a database just for the purpose of maintaining these flags. Additionally, if the toggles are set up to be changed in a runtime manner then this can lead to large numbers of database queries for a very small number of toggles that rarely change their state.
Toggle’s can be confusing for users, especially when they are used to seeing green as a “on” and red as an “off”. To address this, designers often add visual cues to help clarify which is which.
Savvy teams understand that Feature Toggles are inventory that comes with a carrying cost and seek to keep this inventory as low as possible. To that end many teams add a task to their backlogs to remove any toggles when they are no longer needed. Other teams even go as far as adding “expiration dates” to their toggles, so that a test will fail (or perhaps even refuse to start) if a toggle has not been removed by a given date.
When it comes to testing toggles the most important thing is to test the toggle configuration that is expected to be live in production. This should generally include testing the toggle with everything flipped On and the fallback configuration where the toggle is flipped Off. Typically, it’s also wise to test the toggle with some of the future behavior flipped On too, just to ensure that this works as intended.
