A toggle is a control used to switch something on or off, either in the physical world or in software applications. Toggles can be found in everyday technology from the radio buttons on a smartphone to the controls of a power drill. In software applications, toggles are used to turn features on and off or to change their visibility. Toggles are commonly used in A/B tests to validate new functionality with select users before a full rollout.

When designing a toggle, consider the cognitive issues involved and choose labels that make sense. Toggles that have multiple labeled states (either left/right or up/down) can be confusing to users as they need to understand which side the toggle is on before they can interpret what it means. Toggle switches that are shaped like sliders and utilize visual cues help alleviate these issues.

As the number of toggles in a program grows it can become cumbersome to manage them using static files. It’s also challenging to get consistent results when modifying these file based configurations across a large fleet of servers. In these cases it makes more sense to move the toggle configuration into some form of centralized store, often the application DB.

In addition to being simpler to maintain and deploy, the centralized store approach provides the ability to dynamically re-configure individual toggles at runtime. This is important when testing new feature experiments with select user groups as it enables a quicker feedback loop for your engineering team.

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