A toggle is a switch that enforces a mutually exclusive state—on or off. It’s a common pattern to use toggles in settings, programs, or applications, but be careful with this type of control. In some cases, toggles may be confused with buttons, making it difficult for users to understand which action will take place. A toggle should not be used in places where other types of controls are present and a user must click on a Save or Confirm button for changes to take effect.

Toggle switches should be named clearly and concisely. This will help other teams who are working with the same codebase to easily identify which toggle a given error message is referring to. It’s also a good idea to name toggles in the context of the application where they will be used, rather than naming them according to the feature that’s being enabled or disabled.

Using toggles as part of a configuration management system makes it easier to change the behavior of an app without having to change production code or rebuild versions of the product. The best practice is to have a centralized toggle configuration system which enables developers, testers and product managers to dynamically re-configure specific service instances. This can be anything from simple file-based commenting to a full-blown distributed system which runs in the cloud and is managed via some type of API or existing application DB.