In everyday technology, toggles are used to turn features on and off. In software applications they are often used to enable different themes or disable certain settings.

The most common use case for a feature toggle is to allow an administrator to decide whether or not an employee can view their dashboard. It would be very cumbersome to add a permission for each user in the system, especially if a person has many different roles and needs access to multiple types of data. Toggle solves this problem by allowing administrators to make an on/off switch for the toggle that is being used.

A savvy team will consider the inventory of toggles in their codebase to have a carrying cost, and seek to keep this overhead low. They will deploy feature toggles whenever possible, but they will also take care to remove them as soon as their lifecycle has finished. This can be accomplished by adding toggle removal tasks to the team backlog, or by building a process into the management tools they use.

The primary caveat for using toggles is that they must be designed with accessibility in mind. This means that they should be labelled in an accessible manner, and not rely solely on color to convey their current state (as checkboxes do). Additionally, they should not change states unexpectedly or randomly. This is best done through a combination of visual cues such as animation and changing color, and textual explanations to avoid ambiguity.