Toggle is a digital magazine that brings together technology leaders to learn from each other and stay ahead of the curve. Each issue explores a unique topic from the perspectives of senior-level technologists who have made it work for their organizations. We cover strategies for digging out of technical debt, the best practices for building a strong culture in IT, how to make your organization more efficient, and so much more.

In technology, computing, programming and communications, toggle describes a switch that can be pressed or clicked to change between two states or options. In web design, toggles can be used to switch between different layouts or display options based on screen size or device type.

When toggles are used, it’s important to provide clear, direct labels that describe what the toggle will do when pressed. A simple text label like “on/off” will suffice, but it’s good to be more descriptive and incorporate visual cues (i.e. movement or color) to avoid confusion.

For example, in our research, we found that the toggle with the greatest font size difference performed worse than those with the smallest difference because users didn’t understand its current state. This was a cognitive problem that we could easily fix by introducing an additional, more obvious indication of the toggle’s current state.

When deploying toggles as feature flags, it’s important to test both the configuration that will be live in production and a fallback configuration where existing or legacy behavior is enabled when the toggle is flipped Off. This is especially important for Ops Toggles where we’re relying on a CI/CD system to rapidly re-deploy and validate toggles for each release cycle.