Selecting one chair to suit lots of people is a very different exercise to choosing from lots of chairs to suit one person.
There are a lot of things that should be considered but very often the thought process stops at the colour.
Colour is of course important to many corporates. And most chairs can be had in any colour so this should always be the last thing to be looked at.
First we need to consider who is going to be using the chairs. Are these workstations being used by different people each day? We’ll be looking for chairs with fewer features and easy to understand controls. A few features correctly adjusted are going to be much better than lots of features used incorrectly.
Is this a company with a low staff turnover, generally using the same chair everyday? Then we can teach them once how to use their chair and maybe get something with a greater level of adjustment.
We don’t want them to be too complicated, and the controls should be placed in sight and easy to reach, then there’s at least half a chance that they’ll be adjusted correctly.
The RH Mereo is a great example in this field. It is simply brilliant, with the emphasis on simple. You don’t have to crawl under the chair to find the minor controls. And pull on the large levers and it’s immediately obvious what they do.
We have to consider the tasks the user is going to be performing. A Chair for someone doing manual work at a bench will be different to one for a user pouring over data on spreadsheets, which will be different for a security team looking up at large monitors etc.
The chairs will have to be adjustable. A chair that has almost no adjustment at all is fine if it fits you, but that’s never going to be the case when looking at a chair for many. The greater the adjustment for seat depth in particular, the more people the one design is going to work for.
We spend an awful lot of time sitting in our work chairs, choose wisely!
