A toggle is a simple user-interface component that lets users update settings and preferences. When designing toggles, it’s important to think about how they’ll be used by real people and provide direct labels with clear action-oriented text. They should also utilize visual cues to avoid confusion.

Feature toggling is a technique that can be used to help you test different variations of the same functionality in an experiment without impacting real visitors. Toggle routing allows you to send each individual visitor down one of two codepaths based on their cohort and then track the performance of each variant.

Toggles are often used to allow readers to expand or collapse article content in order to reduce the amount of scrolling they have to do. Ideally the toggles are positioned within the article so that the majority of the content can still be seen even when it’s collapsed.

The most effective visual cue for a toggle switch is to use a more pronounced/saturated color to indicate the active state and a lighter font to denote the inactive state. Embossment is also a popular choice for toggle switches but it proved to be unreliable at conveying the difference in states, particularly when used alone. It should always be paired with a primary visual cue such as a border or font-weight/size. Toggle configuration that is hardcoded into static files can become cumbersome at scale and it’s difficult to reliably modify the config across a fleet of servers. For this reason many organizations choose to move toggle configuration into some type of centralized store, often an existing application DB, which provides more dynamic re-configuration.