With Apple’s Tim Cook calling sitting “the new cancer,” (or alternatively, the new smoking) standing desks are attracting a lot of interest — witness the Onion’s many jabs at standing . Going the whole hog can be tricky, however, as replacing all the desks in an office would be expensive — especially if it turned out that after the initial excitement, people didn’t like standing.

For our experiment, we bought two Varidesk Pro Plus desks. After some discussion about how best to have people try out the desks, we set them up as hotdesks on the end of a table and created a spreadsheet in which people could book two-day slots.

As nearly all of the Many have laptops, moving to a standing desk is pretty easy. The desks have their own displays, so moving doesn’t require lugging a monitor over to them.

One key thing to remember about standing desks is that the point isn’t to stand all the time! Standing for long durations can get tiring and having an easily adjustable desk that can be raised and lowered during the course of the day is really useful.

Varidesk offers a desktop app that allows you to set periodic reminders to stand up or sit down. To help, uh, motivate you, it also shows you an estimate of the calories you’ve burned standing. However, I found the app to be next to useless: the reminders went unnoticed and the ability to “re-synch” with it was impossible. It’s also difficult to dismiss or quit.

So far, about a third of the Many have tried the standing desks. About a fifth have no interest in trying one. The rest — nearly half the office — expressed interest in trying it out, but have not yet done so.

I’m tempted to draw my own conclusions of what this says about the true interest in trying the standing desks; if you haven’t done so in two months, perhaps you’re not that interested. As people who conduct user research well know, this demonstrates the difference between intent and action, of people saying something versus people actually doing it.

Sitting next to someone standing can be a bit awkward...

Generally speaking, the desks work quite well: they’re easy to lift and lower even with the weight of an external monitor on it. They feel solid enough, though due to how they reverberate (described below) I wouldn’t feel comfortable using them on the cheapest Ikea desks (the ones where you screw on four £2 legs).

Here’s a few things that we’ve we noticed:

Based on a quick survey, of those who tried the standing desks, nearly 60% wanted their own, one quarter would be happy to use it once in a while (continuing hotdesking), and one in six said they’d like to try it again. (It bears to note that there was no “I don’t want to use it again” option… D’oh!)

Personally, I was surprised at how comfortably I was able to stand for long stretches, often standing all day and sitting only at meetings and lunch. While I found it initially a bit difficult to get into “the zone” while standing, getting past this happened quite quickly.

I’m sold on standing desks. And for those holdouts who still want to sit, there’s always the “bottom bunk”...