What Is a Toggle?

A toggle is a switch that can be used to turn on or off features. This term is also commonly used in software to describe a feature that can be activated and deactivated at will. For example, a toggle can be used to clear your browser history, app data, or other settings. In software a toggle is often implemented as an in-product menu item that allows the user to configure and control various settings in a given program.

In terms of UI design it’s important to ensure that toggles are easy to understand and use. The best way to do this is to provide clear, direct labels and to use a simple visual design (i.e., a slider-like appearance and visual cues such as movement and color) to convey the toggle state. Toggle colors should be high-contrast to ensure that users can easily see state changes and be aware of what they’re doing. In addition to this, it’s also important to consider societal and cultural implications when selecting a color for toggle states.

Finally, it’s important to remember that while a toggle can be configured to turn on and off features it doesn’t necessarily enable all available behaviors. To help mitigate this risk it’s wise for teams to test their releases with all toggles flipped on, and to make sure that any legacy or future behavior is enabled when a toggle is flipped on. This is typically done by testing with the toggle configuration that is expected to be live in production and a fallback configuration with all toggles flipped off.