How to Design a Togle
A toggle is a switch that enforces a mutually exclusive state, allowing users to select either ‘on’ or ‘off’. These switches are used across many different types of interfaces in technology, computing, programming and communications.
When designing a toggle, it’s important to consider the accessibility of your design. Typically, toggles are built using CSS and HTML, which aren’t accessible to screen readers and other assistive technologies (see our article on Accessible Toggles). This makes it hard for these users to interact with the toggle and can result in them not being able to change its current state at all. To avoid this, make sure that your toggle is designed with accessibility in mind, and use visual cues like movement and color to signal its current state.
Another thing to keep in mind with toggles is that they can be confusing to some users. To avoid this, make sure that your design is consistent, and that the labels on both sides of the toggle clearly convey its current state. For example, if the right-most toggle is “cookies”, be sure that it says so on both sides of the switch.
Finally, toggles can be difficult to manage at scale. For this reason, savvy teams try to keep their toggle inventory low by ensuring that they remove them as soon as they’re no longer needed. This can be done in a number of ways, from adding an ‘expiration date’ to their release process to putting ‘time bombs’ in their code that will cause the feature to fail when it’s run past its expiration.