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When it comes to building responsive designs in web development, toggles are a key UI element to consider. They allow you to enable or disable components on a page depending on the screen size of a visitor’s device. When implemented correctly, this approach can greatly reduce the amount of scrolling required to find relevant content and help visitors better understand what is available to them.
But just because toggles can be beneficial doesn’t mean they should be used in all situations. Using them incorrectly can lead to confusion and frustration for users, so it’s important to think carefully about when they are appropriate. And when they are, how can you best use them to your advantage?
In a toggle, the label for each state should be clear. The word on and off should be clearly displayed, and the icon should also provide visual cues to help the user decide which state they want. Choosing an icon is not as easy as it seems, though—it has to be both easily recognizable and relatable to the toggle’s current state. For example, in the toggle above, the icon for on is a check mark and the one for off is a trash can. The result is a clear visual distinction between the two states but one that can still be confusing for some users.
It’s also important to note that the text in a toggle should not be too large. As Adrian Roselli explains in his article, if the text is too small it will be difficult for users to perceive whether or not the switch is on or off. In fact, it can even become distracting and lead to a feeling of incompletion when trying to use the toggle.
Toggles are also a common tool for performing multivariate testing (A/B testing). By configuring the toggle to either send a given user down one codepath or another, you can measure the impact of your change without having to deploy and test it on an entire population of users at once.
Managing toggle configuration via static files can become cumbersome at scale, especially if you are relying on an existing application DB to manage your feature flags. For this reason, many organizations opt to move their toggle configuration into some type of centralized store which allows for dynamic re-configuration.
For more on this topic check out our blog post about how to choose the best markup for a toggle: should it be a