A toggle is a piece of wood or plastic which is sewn to something such as a coat or bag, and pushed through a loop or hole in order to fasten it. Toggles are also used in technology and computing to switch between two different functions.

In software applications, a toggle is often represented by a Boolean variable that can be either True or False. A toggle can be activated or deactivated by a button click or other event, and when it is activated the state of the variable changes to the opposite of its previous value. This change can be triggered whenever the toggle is pressed or clicked, and it can also be triggered by certain events such as changing a screen background image or enabling or disabling a feature.

Toggles are often employed to enable or disable features in a web application, and they can be used for many purposes including updating preferences, settings, and other types of information. When using toggles it is important to be sure that the user understands what each of the states represents, and it is best to use direct labels and standard visual design in order to minimize confusion.

One of the more common uses for a toggle is to support more agile development and testing processes. A toggle allows your team to build a new feature while keeping it hidden from all users until the feature has been tested, vetted, and made ready for release. This is a great way to speed up your development process without sacrificing the quality of your product.

Another use of a toggle is to provide a method for performing multivariate or A/B testing. A toggle can be assigned to a specific cohort of users and will consistently send them down one or the other codepath, allowing you to determine which option is most effective for your audience.

The use of a toggle can also make your application more accessible to users with disabilities. When designing your toggles be careful to not rely too heavily on visual cues to convey their current states, as these can be confusing for users with accessibility needs. For example, a toggle which uses a colored background to show its active state has been shown to confuse users with red/green color blindness.

Be sure to deploy toggles strategically and to prune them as soon as they have outlived their usefulness. It is also a good idea to give your toggles meaningful names so that anyone in your team can quickly and easily understand what they do and what their current state is. This will help reduce the amount of overhead that your team has to deal with when managing and maintaining a large number of toggles. This can be done by adding a task to your team’s backlog or by building a toggle management process into your development tools. If you have any questions about creating or deploying toggles please don’t hesitate to reach out to the product management team at Glide.