Toggle is a digital trade journal exploring the vital role technology plays in companies and organizations across industries and the men and women who manage them. It explores everything from cybersecurity and data privacy to artificial intelligence and cloud solutions.
A toggle is a switch that has two positions: On and Off. When used appropriately, toggle switches can be very effective for updating user preferences and settings. When used incorrectly, however, toggles can cause confusion and mislead users. To avoid this, it’s important to consider the context and audience of any toggle switch you use. In addition, it’s crucial to use consistent visual design and appropriate language to signal the toggle’s state to users.
The most common use case for toggles is to perform A/B testing. By putting new functionality behind a feature toggle and bucketing your users into cohorts, you can see which version of your application performs best with the help of statistical significance.
With a toggle, your engineering team can test new features with a segment of your audience in a real-world environment before rolling them out to the entire user base. This is a great way to prevent regression bugs and ensure that new features are well-received by your audience.
Many teams store their toggle configuration in static files (like HTML and CSS), but this approach can become cumbersome as the number of toggles grows. To address this issue, most organizations opt to store their toggle configuration in some type of centralized location like an existing application database or the service Kameleoon. This enables your systems to query the toggle’s configuration at runtime and turn it ON or OFF without requiring code deployment.