Toggle is a word that describes a switch with two positions: on and off. It can also be used as a verb, meaning to alternate between one thing and another — for example, to toggle between screens as you video chat with two people at once.
Toggles are a great choice when you need to allow users to update preferences, settings or other types of information. However, be careful: misusing toggle switches can lead to confusing user experiences. Toggle switches should only be used when the options they control are mutually exclusive, and when their current state is clear to the user based on context (e.g., “Do you want to download photos and videos?”).
In general, designers add colors to help distinguish between the states of a toggle switch, but this can actually make things worse for users who have red/green color blindness or other forms of color vision impairment. Plus, if your toggle has an empty or passive state that isn’t immediately obvious, users may be confused as to what to press next.
Additionally, if your feature flag system doesn’t support runtime configuration then flipping a toggle will require you to re-deploy the artifact in a test environment, which can have a negative impact on your validation cycle time and the all-important feedback loop that drives CI/CD success. In this case it’s worth considering moving toggle configuration into some type of centralized store, often an existing application DB, so that you can manage these settings dynamically and avoid the need to re-deploy your artifacts.
