How to Design Good Toggle Switches

In computer technology, a toggle is a switch with two positions: On and Off. Toggle switches are used to change preferences, settings, and other types of information.

Toggle Labels: Clear and Specific

Good toggle labels describe what the control will do when the switch is on; they should not be neutral or ambiguous. Make them short and direct, limiting the total number of words in the label to one or two words, preferably nouns.

Color: Use a high-contrast color to signal state changes, such as red for the On position. This contrast makes it easier for users to distinguish whether a toggle is on or off, and is important for people who are visually impaired.

Visual Design: Avoid low-contrast colors and consider a standard visual design, using sliders or other icons to convey states. This helps ensure a consistent user experience.

Dynamic Feature Flag Re-Configuration: If you’re testing a feature flag, it’s important to be able to quickly flip it between Off and On in-memory. Having to restart the process you’re testing or worse, deploy a new artifact into your testing environment to change its configuration is a pain and can derail a release cycle.

Experiment Toggles: For multivariate or A/B testing you may need to place a user in multiple cohorts and toggle the feature on or off at runtime, depending on which cohort they are placed in. This can be a complex and fiddly process for both teams and their stakeholders to manage so it’s best to use a toggle router which will make these decisions on-the-fly at runtime, making the whole exercise much less fiddly.