A toggle is a kind of switch that can either be on or off. You might use one to change a setting on your computer or phone, for example, to turn off the sound or to delete your recent activity. Toggles can also be used in interfaces to control things like navigation or the display of information.
When designing a toggle you must consider how users will understand its current state. It’s a good idea to use consistent visual cues (color or size, for example) to help people identify the toggle’s current state. For example, using a more saturated color to indicate the active option and a lighter color to indicate the inactive one can help. Using these visual cues helps people make sense of the toggle’s current state quickly and easily.
Toggles are a great way to enable feature flags in your application. Feature flags allow you to experiment with different configurations of your application without risking production stability. A toggle is a way to manage feature flags by enabling a new behavior when the toggle is flipped On and disabling it when the toggle is flipped Off. Toggles are also a good tool for performing multivariate or A/B testing since they allow you to consistently send a cohort of users down one codepath or the other.
It’s important to test the toggle configuration that you expect to become live in production and a fall-back configuration where all toggles are flipped Off. It’s also wise to perform some tests where all toggles are flipped On so that you can see how your users will react to the new behavior.