Toggle is a digital trade journal that highlights the vital role technology plays in companies and organizations of all industries, and the men and women who lead them. From data privacy and cybersecurity to cloud solutions, Toggle looks at the challenges that leaders of these organizations face in achieving their mission.
A toggle switch is a simple way to allow users to change settings or preferences. The most common use of a toggle is to enable or disable cookies, but it can also be used for anything else that can be changed with two options (on or off). In general, it’s best not to use toggles in long form interfaces, and even in short forms, it’s generally preferred to replace them with a checkbox instead.
The main reason for this is that toggles require a user to click or tap the button in order to change the state, and there’s often some amount of time delay before that happens. This can make it difficult to communicate the effect of a toggle’s change, and it’s generally preferable to just use a checkbox that will immediately reflect the new state without any additional user input.
Savvy teams consider the toggle configurations that live side-by-side in their source control as inventory which comes with a carrying cost, and seek to keep this inventory low. They accomplish this by ensuring that each release is tested with the toggles expected to be live in production flipped Off, and by performing some tests with those same toggles flipped On. Some teams go as far as to set expiration dates on their toggles to ensure that they get proactively removed before they become an obstacle.
