Toggle – Designing Toggle Toggles

Toggle is an online magazine highlighting the vital role technology plays in modern organizations and the men and women who make it happen. From data privacy and cybersecurity to the latest cloud solutions, Toggle explains how today’s CIOs and CTOs are navigating an ever-changing landscape.

A toggle is the ideal control when you want to give users a binary choice that will have an immediate impact (either ON or OFF). This is why toggles are the preferred method for switching system settings on mobile. For example, it’s best to use a toggle to switch Airplane Mode ON or OFF rather than a radio button.

When designing toggles it’s important to think about the visual cues that you’re using to communicate their state. One option is to use a darker color for the active toggle and a lighter color for the inactive toggle. However, this has been shown to be unreliable and we recommend that you instead consider other visual cues such as a more pronounced or saturated color.

Savvy teams also try to be proactive in removing the unused toggles from their codebase. This is because a feature flag’s inventory comes with a carrying cost and it’s always best to keep the number of toggles low so that they can be easily tested, deployed, and removed. This is why some teams have a policy of adding a task to the team’s backlog for toggle removal whenever a new toggle is added.