Designing User Interface Toggles for Usability

Abstract

Toggles are used extensively by all major software vendors and often in the form of sliders. Although they mostly all share an on or off functionality, there are differences in how designers and developers represent these actions in the user interface. There can also be differences in the kind of state changes these toggles operate. We present in this paper a new contribution concerning the design of usable UI toggles. We designed and developed a series of prototypes that were evaluated experimentally and subjectively by real participants. The results clearly show that certain designs currently in use create confusion and negative user perceptions and therefore should be avoided. We present a series of toggle design guidelines based on the results that, if followed by designers and developers, will help to produce more usable UIs for better user experiences.