How not to get boggled by toggles

TLDR

• Think in terms of things being turned “on” or turned “off”.
• Fill in the blank: “when this is turned on, the customer can __________.”
• What you use to fill the blank is your toggle label, or very close!
• Enable, disable, activate and deactivate are often the least helpful words you can put next to a toggle because they emphasise the state of the feature, not what the customer can do with it.

Turn on, turn off

A toggle is a digital on/off switch.

That’s all it is.

And like the light switches on your walls, they are either “on” or “off”.

You gain little if anything by activating, deactivating, enabling or disabling stuff with them.

When you see a toggle, always think in terms of on and off. It makes life simpler for everybody.

Elucidate the state

Are “on” and “off” clear enough though?

It depends. What works best most often is to state the benefit the customer gains from switching the toggle “on”.

In practice

Let’s talk about invoices.

The temptation most of the time is to put something like this next to a toggle:

Enable invoices [toggle]

What does it mean to “enable” invoices? It means “turn on the invoices feature.” But that doesn’t provide much more information than “enable invoices” does.

So what actually happens when the customer “turns on the invoices feature”?

Create, send and receive invoices [toggle]

Want more?

Enable direct debits [toggle]

What does it mean to “enable direct debits”? What can the customer actually do?

Make direct debit payments [toggle]

Extra fun: The pains of localising “on” and “off”

Some languages have structural complexities that bear paying attention to.

Finnish, for example, uses “postpositions” (or worse, “agglutination”), i.e., endings with which nouns are inflected to indicate that something is in a state of “on” or “off”.

So whereas in English “on” means “in an activated state”, in Finnish you need to say what is in an activated state, then inflect it with the “on” postposition.

So be careful with “on” and “off”: 2 letters in English could end up 20 in Finnish!