Toggle is a switch that allows you to change the state of something. It’s often used in technology, computing, programming, and communications to give users control over settings and options. For example, you can toggle Airplane Mode ON and OFF with a button on your phone. You can also toggle brightness and volume with controls on your television or headphones. In user interface design, toggles are usually easier to use than radio buttons because they have an obvious default state when untouched (ON or OFF). In addition to providing an intuitive experience, using toggles can increase the usability of your site or app by reducing the number of clicks required for users to update preferences, settings, and other types of information.
The best toggles provide clear labels and deliver immediate results. Toggles are not a good choice for long forms that require users to click a Save or Confirm button before the changes take effect. If you need to use toggles in a long form, consider adding a processing status loop animation to indicate that the new state has been applied.
Toggles are commonly used in A/B testing, also known as multivariate testing. In A/B testing, each cohort is exposed to one of two different versions of a product feature. Typically, the version that performs better will be deployed to all users and the experiment toggle will be removed. Toggles are also often used by dev teams to temporarily disable features while they are in development. For example, if the team needs to make a significant change to the existing codebase they can create a release toggle that disables the feature for the duration of the test and then enable it again when the build is complete.
