A toggle is a user interface component that allows users to update their preferences, settings, and other types of information. Toggles can help reduce the amount of scrolling and navigation required on a website or app while providing users with immediate results. When designing a toggle, it is important to be mindful of the context in which it is being used and implement it consistently throughout your site or app. It is also recommended that you provide direct labels for the toggle and utilize standard visual design to avoid any confusion or ambiguity.

Feature Toggles are a great way to test changes in production without the risk of impacting users that don’t need the change. However, the use of toggles can lead to an overwhelming number of conditional statements within a codebase that can hinder readability and overall maintenance of the product. To minimize this, it is important to be proactive in monitoring the use of toggles and to regularly refactor the codebase where necessary.

Many teams choose to use a centralized toggle management solution that helps with this process. This solution typically provides a set of admin tools for developers to easily modify feature flags and toggle configuration. These solutions also often provide a unified view of all active toggles in a production environment and can help to eliminate the need for multiple feature branch merges. This can be particularly beneficial in environments where teams work with Agile processes.

When Should You Use Toggles?

Toggles are a great user-interface component for letting people manage the state of content or a view. They are also ideal for performing A/B testing. However, they should not be used for navigating or selecting items that need to be selected from a list — for those scenarios, it’s better to use a different user-interface element like a checkbox or radio button.

Using toggles on web pages can be problematic for people with accessibility issues. The reason is that toggles often rely on color to convey their states, and color blindness is very common. For example, if a toggle is set to green, it will be invisible for people who have red/green color blindness. In addition, it’s not good practice to rely solely on visual cues to communicate states — that’s the same advice that applies to other forms of UI control like checkboxes and radio buttons.

When you use a toggle, it’s important to test all of the possible toggle configurations. This includes both the current production toggle configuration as well as a fall-back toggle configuration where existing or legacy behavior is enabled and new or experimental behavior is disabled. Many teams also perform some tests with all of the toggles flipped to On so they can catch regressions that may be difficult to detect in automated test runs.

Aside from testing all of the possible toggle configurations, a good feature toggle management system will allow you to create different groups for releasing features to. For example, if you have a premium service for paying customers you might want to have a group of users that gets all the new features first. This will allow you to perform A/B testing and learn which features work best for your audience before deploying them to everyone.