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A toggle is a control that lets users update their preferences, settings, or other types of information. It’s a powerful tool that should be used sparingly and carefully to improve user experience. Toggle switches should be clearly labeled, utilize visual cues like movement and color to signal state change, and deliver immediate results.

When a toggle is set to ‘on’ the switch should be visually separated from other elements to make it obvious to the user that this is an active control. Color can also be a helpful indicator but remember that 8% of males have red/green color blindness and it is important to evaluate societal and cultural implications when selecting a toggle color.

Toggles are commonly used to perform multivariate or A/B testing by sending a cohort of users down one codepath or the other. This allows you to track how different features impact user behavior and then make data-driven optimizations in areas like a purchase flow in an ecommerce system or the wording on a call to action button.

It’s tempting to keep a toggle switched on for as long as possible but this can be confusing for the rest of your team and a real pain to debug weeks or months down the line when it needs to be disabled. Try to keep the number of toggles deployed low and have a process in place for pruning them as soon as their lifecycle has finished.