What Is a Toggle?
Toggle is a term used in technology, computing, programming, and communications to describe a switch or feature that can be changed between two states or options. It’s often seen in application interface design where it can be used to allow users to personalize the look and feel of an interface or enable features that may not be required for their specific use case.
A Toggle is a key tool in a continuous development practice that allows teams to experiment with and roll out new functionality to a segment of their users before it’s made available for everyone. This can help to reduce the risk that a new feature won’t be well received and also supports agile development processes where a team would typically be required to commit changes to code branches under more traditional waterfall models.
The toggling of features can be managed in a number of ways, with some approaches being fairly simple but others adding a significant amount of complexity to the solution. Some of the simplest approaches involve hardcoding toggle configuration within static files while others require deploying and re-deploying code in order to change the state of a toggle – both of which can add significant time and cost to your CI/CD process and can be prone to issues if not done consistently.
When designing UIs that utilize toggles be sure to consider usability and accessibility concerns. Visual cues such as color and animation can be used to signal state changes but care should be taken not to rely on these alone as they can be confusing for some users. Consider using clear labels next to toggles to help avoid ambiguity and provide consistency across the product.