A toggle lets people manage the state of a setting, view or piece of content. Toggles are often used to hide or display content and features, but they can also be used to enable or disable features. Toggles enforce a single, mutually exclusive state (on or off) and use a distinct appearance to show the current status.

Toggles are useful in responsive designs because they allow you to control the visibility of certain components without needing to modify underlying code. Toggle configuration can be managed in various ways, ranging from simple and less dynamic to complex and more sophisticated. However, any method of re-configuring toggles needs to be designed carefully to prevent problems such as bugs and misfeatures.

The word toggle derives from the notion of a rod placed transversely through a loop or eye in a chain, rope or similar element as to bind it temporarily. It also refers to a button that can be moved between two positions, such as those found on clothing.

Software developers use toggles to enable experimental or temporary behavior on production code that would otherwise require it to be on a separate branch. These toggles allow development teams to release new functionality while still allowing the full testing and QA process to take place. Toggle configuration is typically managed through some type of centralized storage (e.g. an existing application DB) and an admin UI that allows for easy access by system operators and testers.

Generally, it’s best to keep the number of feature toggles in your production code to a minimum. Too many can negatively impact performance because every time a toggle is re-configured it can cause a database call, which can add up over the course of the day for production systems with large volumes of data.

The best practice is to only use toggles to help users manage the state of settings, views or pieces of content, not a wider set of actions. If you need to support broader action sets, use a different component such as a pop-up button.

When using toggles to manage the visibility of content, make sure that you always clearly identify which setting, view or piece of content the toggle affects. You should also supply an interface icon that communicates the toggle’s purpose and update its appearance—typically by changing the background—based on the current state.

An e-commerce company is debating togel singapore whether their configurator should use algorithm A or algorithm B for suggesting products to users. To test which is better, they add an experiment toggle to the configurator and split users into cohorts with either the A or the B algorithm enabled. After three weeks they feel confident that the B algorithm is performing better and remove the experiment toggle, making algorithm B live for all users. If the A algorithm performs better, it can be re-introduced at a later date through another experiment toggle. This process continues until the team feels they have conclusive evidence that one of their algorithms is superior to the other.