In an era where many of us are sitting in front of a computer more than ever before, the impact a good or bad office chair can make on your productivity, comfort, and work-day happiness has grown in parallel. In our quest to find the best chair available, we selected those chairs we thought had the most potential to offer high performance, both generally and in regard to meeting niche needs. We also understand that a quality office chair can be the difference between maintaining productivity for hours or end or leaving your workstation with a persistent backache, and we made sure to investigate chairs at all price points. Once we selected the chairs we thought had the most potential, we bought each of them and put our panel of expert testers to task, evaluating everything from overall comfort and adjustability to the materials used and quality of the assembly instructions. We wanted to know what chair was best for different sitters and situations, from ergonomic enthusiasts to budget shoppers, and broke down our investigation of each model into three distinct categories of evaluation: comfort, adjustability, and ease of assembly. If you want to see how specific chairs scored or which ones came out on top, head over to our complete office chair review.
Comfort
Comfort is king for office chairs, and it was the most impactful metric we considered in our review of each chair, accounting for 50% of the overall score each chair earned. To mitigate the subjectivity of how comfortable a chair is, we deployed a multi-buttocks approach and ensured that each chair was tested for comfortability by at least four of our expert judges for at least a full workday. Each judge was asked to respond to more than a dozen comfort-oriented questions, such as “How comfortable were the armrests?” and “How many hours do you think you could sit in this chair?” Additionally, we asked each judge to write qualitative notes about how comfortable the chairs were and what they discovered during testing that wasn't captured by our initial survey. For example, one of our judges, Lesley, noted that she was able to spend an entire workday on the EDX Armless Criss Cross Chair with Wheels with her dog seated right next to her on the chair because of how wide the seat cushion was. At the end of our review of each chair, we averaged the overall scores to determine the final comfort score for each product.
Adjustability
Adjustability features can make an already comfortable chair even more enjoyable to sit in and can turn an otherwise lackluster chair into something worth considering because of how important it is to long-term comfort, especially during extended sitting sessions. Having an adjustable office chair allows you to dial in your exact seating preferences, which can make a bigger difference in overall comfort than just a high-quality backrest and thick seat cushion. Because of this, how adjustable each of the chairs we tested accounted for 40% of the overall score. We employed the same multi-judge evaluation model for adjustability that we did for comfort, but we asked our judges to rank each chair on 5 different aspects of adjustability: the backrest, the seat pan, the armrests, the tension knob, and ergonomics. Within each of these categories, we honed in on important sub-considerations such as whether or not chairs had independent, adjustable lumbar and if the armrests could go side to side as well as up and down. Our judges paid particular attention to how easy it was to actually effect adjustments as well.
We also compared and scored each chair based on the user-friendliness and capabilities of the reclining lever and the tilt limiters, such as the different positions you can lock the chair into and the different set points for the limiters. We also compared backrest height with testers of different heights and body types to ensure our top picks were compatible with as many sitters as possible.
Next, we looked at how much customization is afforded to you by the armrests on each chair. Specifically, we awarded points to each chair if the armrests can move up or down, in or out, forward and back, or swivel. We also had our judges rate the armrest adjustability to see if the chair offered enough range of motion to accommodate our largest and smallest testers.
For our seat adjustment test, we had our judges rate the amount of customization available, such as its range of motion up and down and forward and back. In particular, we had our shortest and tallest testers note if they could achieve the correct height and depth to properly place their feet on the ground.
Next, we looked at the tension knob adjustment of each chair. This knob sets the amount of resistance when reclining, and we scored each chair — if it had one — on how easy it was to reach and how easy it was to adjust to find your preferred setting.
Finally, we used standard guidelines for an ergonomic desk setup to see if our judges could successfully adjust the chair to get their body position to match the guidelines. We again made sure that our tallest and shortest testers tried out each chair for this test to ensure that the chairs had enough range of movement (or noted those that did not) for a wide variety of people.
Ease of Assembly
Although assembly is (hopefully) a one-time project for a new office chair, we wanted our top picks to be easy to use from start to finish. How easy each office chair was to assemble accounted for 10% of the overall score. We timed our lead tester, Rachel, on how long it took her to assemble each chair and took notes on the quality of the instructions and how well the hardware was labeled. We compared our results to see which chairs were easiest to assemble and which ones were hardest to put together for a novice assembler with little to no prior experience building or assembling furniture.
