About DeskGauge

My name is Marc. I work from home part of the time, and like most people who do, I mainly wanted to be comfortable doing it.

That turned out to be harder to research than it should be. Search for a desk chair and you get the same eight products in a different order on thirty different sites, described in the same enthusiastic language, with nobody explaining what "ergonomic" is supposed to mean or how you would know whether a chair fits you. It is a marketing problem dressed up as an advice problem, and it leaves people spending hundreds on furniture that does not address what is actually wrong with their setup.

So I started writing down the unglamorous version instead: what the ergonomics literature supports, what a product's adjustment range actually is, and which problems can be fixed for nothing before spending anything at all.

What I am not

I am not a physiotherapist, a doctor, or a certified ergonomist, and I am not going to pretend otherwise. What I do is read the research rather than the marketing, check the adjustment specifications rather than the feature list, and refuse to recommend anything that fails the tests this site tells you to run.

Where a recommendation rests on specifications, owner reports and published research rather than hands-on use, the page says so plainly.Here is the full method.

The rules this site runs on

These are not aspirations. They are constraints, and they cost me money.

• Nobody pays for placement. No sponsored posts, no brand partnerships, no payment to be included or ranked. Every commission comes from a retailer after a sale, never from a manufacturer beforehand.
• Fit beats features. A product is only ergonomic if it matches your body. I would rather explain the measurement you need than list specifications that sound impressive.
• Free fixes come first. Screen height, desk height and arm support cause most home-office discomfort, and all three are free to correct. Several guides here end by telling you to buy nothing. That is not modesty — it is usually the right answer.
• No recommendation is better than a bad one. The chair guide currently recommends no chair at all, because no high-volume seller I checked adjusts seat depth — the first thing that same guide tells you to test.

How it is funded

Affiliate commissions from Amazon. When you follow a link from this site and buy something, Amazon pays me a small percentage and you pay exactly what you would have paid anyway. That is the entire business model, and it is set out in full on thedisclosure page.

The obvious risk of that model is that it rewards telling you to buy things. I manage it by publishing the criteria before the products, by refusing to quote prices I cannot keep accurate, and by being willing to end a guide with "you do not need this".

What this site is not

It is not medical advice, and it never will be. Ergonomics is about reducing the load a workspace puts on a body — it is not treatment. If you have persistent pain, pain that wakes you at night, or numbness and tingling in your hands, that belongs with a clinician rather than with a buying guide.

Corrections

Specifications change without notice, products get revised silently, and I get things wrong. If you spot an error — or if something here reads like it was written for the commission rather than for you — write to hello@deskgauge.com. I would rather fix the page than defend it.