Toggle is a digital magazine about the people who make technology work. The magazine focuses on the leadership of organizations that run large infrastructures and IT departments, and how they keep their organizations running smoothly. Toggle features articles that discuss how these leaders build teams, tackle technical debt, and manage the complexity of IT in modern enterprises.

Toggles can be a helpful user-interface element when users need to update settings, preferences, or other types of information. When used correctly, toggles can make these changes more visible and clear to users than other alternatives. However, it’s important to remember that toggles don’t necessarily communicate the state of the switch using text (on/off). Instead, they rely on other visual cues like color and movement to signal their state.

It is important to note that not all colors are created equal and it is crucial for designers to consider the societal, cultural, and accessibility implications of their choice of color for toggles. For example, red can be confusing to users with a red/green color vision deficiency because it is interpreted as a stop sign or traffic signal in their culture.

Toggles should be deployed and managed strategically. A good practice is to name feature toggles clearly and give them an expiration date. This will help with the management overhead of these toggles and allow developers to know when they need to prune them from the codebase. This can be done through a simple commenting approach or using a preprocessor feature like #ifdef.