Toggle is a component that allows you to show/hide content and is useful for situations like accordions, menus, and question-and-answer pages. Toggles are easy to use because they require no HTML markup and work with all browsers (provided they support
When used appropriately, toggles provide clear feedback to the user. When a user selects a toggle switch, they should see a visual indication that the content associated with the switch will be revealed or hidden. For example, using the right color or a simple animation can help to communicate this to the user.
Toggles are also useful for performing multivariate or A/B testing on your website. The Toggle Router consistently sends users down one codepath or the other based on their cohort and can help you make data-driven optimizations to things like the purchase flow of your ecommerce system, or Call To Action wording on a button.
A toggle is a rod-shaped button that can be inserted into a large eye or loop in a chain, rope, etc., so as to bind it temporarily and easily. The term “toggle” has since come to be used more generally for any kind of toggle-able device, including things like swivel chairs, pulleys, and zippers.
In software development, a feature toggle (sometimes called a feature flag) is a way to allow developers to create new functionality and keep it invisible for a specific release version. This can be an efficient alternative to creating a full code branch, and it allows teams to still push features into production without having to go through the lengthy testing and debugging process.
It’s important to be careful with how you implement feature toggles and use them, however. Overusing toggles can cause users confusion and lead to bugs that may be difficult to track down months or even years later. Also, be sure to clearly label each toggle and avoid using color alone to indicate a state change — this can be misleading due to societal or cultural implications.
Generally, it’s best to limit the number of features a toggle controls to a small set and minimize the amount of time they spend in an active state. This will keep the impact on the rest of your product and the team in general to a minimum.
Toggle configuration can be stored in various ways, but it’s best to keep this configuration as separate from the core application as possible. This will reduce the risk of accidental changes and make it easier for different teams to manage the feature toggles in their respective areas. In the case of larger sites, this often requires moving Toggle Configuration to a centralized repository, such as an existing application database or a dedicated toggle configuration management UI. This can be a significant investment, but can be well worth the cost in terms of improving product quality and speeding up development and testing. This is also a good opportunity to introduce automated tests that can catch these kinds of mistakes early on, before they become more costly to fix.