Toggle is a user interface (UI) component that lets people manage the state of content or a view by enabling and disabling it. It provides direct, easy-to-understand labels and a visual indication of its current state — usually by using a different appearance for each state. In some cases, toggles can also provide a text label that describes the current state of the control.

Toggles are useful for changing settings and features in a product, such as making certain areas of an article private or public at a moment’s notice without editing the content itself. They can also be used to test new features in production without the need for a code branch or other forms of testing and feedback. Toggles are typically created for a specific feature and only appear when that particular feature is activated.

In some cases, developers may decide to create a toggle in order to avoid making a mistake with a bug fix or prevent a change from negatively impacting user experience. This can be more efficient than creating and reintegrating a change into trunk code, and may help prevent a problem from getting worse after a bug fix is applied.

However, it’s important to remember that creating and maintaining a toggle can become a significant management burden for teams, so it is best to only use them as necessary. It is best to keep the inventory of toggles as low as possible and to deploy them quickly once they are needed, in addition to establishing a process for cleaning up old toggles as soon as they have run their course.

It’s critical to carefully consider the context and user goals when designing a toggle. The labels should clearly indicate what the control does when activated and when deactivated, and should make sense when spoken aloud. In addition, the UI should give clear visual cues that signal when the toggle is active.

Using the correct icon for a toggle is another critical design consideration. Depending on the context, an icon can communicate both functionality and state, so it’s important to choose an icon that is easily recognizable to all users. The color of the toggle can also be an important design factor, as it’s essential to consider societal and cultural implications when selecting colors for states.

Toggles can negatively impact performance if they are not properly managed and maintained, especially when they are used in large numbers. For example, a toggle that is dynamically stored in a database can require thousands or even millions of database calls when its value changes. It’s important to limit the number of toggles in production and to clean them up as soon as they have served their purpose, ensuring that production does not rely on unnecessarily costly databases.