Help Me Put the Laundry Basket Where I Throw My Clothes
July 2025
A couple months ago, I found myself on interior design YouTube. And amidst all the advice on throw pillows, sconces, and wall art, there’s a piece of wisdom that really stuck with me.
Put the laundry basket where you throw your clothes. If there’s a pile of clothes next to your bed right now, that is where you should put your laundry basket. Don’t put it in the other corner of the room because it happens to fit perfectly in the crevice next to your dresser. Put it where you naturally throw your clothes.
I love this design advice: we are creating designs that make it easy for people to behave the way they want to—being tidy. And we help people behave well, not by introducing a flashy, attractive product, but instead, by placing the right choice (a laundry basket) exactly where and when someone makes a decision (where to put their dirty clothes).
And this piece of advice can extend to all the places in our lives where we want to make better decisions.
Instead of becoming a tidier person, let’s say I want to become a healthier eater. I may stroll down the grocery snack isle and, in discipline, reach for a new hipster, one-ingredient chip brand instead of the double-stuffed Oreos. I may see a cooking influencer on TikTok, showing one pot healthy meals and decide to follow them. I might see an ad on Instagram showing a super skinny person eating protein meal shakes and sign up for a free trial.
But what I really think would get me to start eating healthier (and is essentially what my mother did to instill healthy eating habits in me growing up) is to have someone come to my house the moment I decide I want to eat and place a fully prepared meal packed with veggies, grains, and proteins right in front of me.
The key here is that someone found me exactly when and where I am about to make a decision and they made it easy for me to choose the option I want to be choosing. We can create endless brands of healthier sodas, chips, and cookies. We can build more air fryers to give us the satisfaction of fried foods without the deep frying. We can develop subscription meal plans that are freezable, packed into jars or other convenient formats, and portioned down to the exact gram of protein someone needs.
But there are already thousands of nutrient dense foods that already exist in the world. We don’t need a magical new food that will satisfy everyone’s food cravings. We need companies and people that take on the responsibility of helping us make the right choices.
I look up to Duolingo because I think they nailed this piece. In one of the Acquired Podcasts with Duolingo founder Luis von Ahn (a fellow Duke alum that I once skipped class to meet!), he talks about how the Duolingo team specifically designs to catch people on their commute—the moment when you step on the subway and pick up your phone, can I catch you and help you learn a little more Spanish. And this goal manifested in design decisions like pushing funny Duo the owl notifications during people’s morning commute. Encouraging you to add a widget with your streak number on your phone home page. Making the lessons short enough to finish in less than 10 minutes. And allowing people to snooze the speaking tasks (for those of us feel embarrassed saying “Quiero manzanas” out loud on the train).
Inevitably, there will be companies that catch and nudge you toward less than ideal behaviors such as scrolling sensationalized, short form videos from big social media companies. And because the power we have to catch people at all moments in their life will only increase with AI glasses and pins, we as producers and consumers have some important decisions to make.
In the impending always on AI future, I can catch you the moment you look at a restaurant menu. The moment your alarm goes off in the morning. The moment when you catch up with a friend.
As a producer, am I going to nudge you to choose a healthy option? or am I going to nudge you to fall for my addictive sugary food brand. Am I going to nudge you to get out of bed and feel excited about work? or am I going to nudge you to fill your impending dread and loneliness with a sensational feed. Am I going to nudge you to be present and curious in a conversation? or am I going to nudge you to influence everyone you meet to purchase my product and beliefs.
As a consumer, will I make an effort to think about what I want my life to look like and make the choice to put good systems in my environment?
Life is hard, and changing our behavior is difficult. It feels naive to believe that we simply need more discipline and sheer will to achieve the things we want to achieve when there’s actively many producers creating against us. And so, I want to us design products that believe people can make the right choices. Products that don’t take people’s attention but instead point people’s attention where they want it. I want to see us design products that help us put the laundry basket where we throw our clothes.
If you made it this far, thank you for reading my July monologue. If you have questions, opinions, experiences about any of these topics, I would love more than to discuss! That’s why I write after all :) You can find me @jjanezhang on X.
A special shoutout to my friend Michelle for nudging me to write about what I want to see more companies do and create in the world.
Other topics I thought about but didn’t write about:
I want everyone to have a person, an LLM agent, fighting for them to experience everything they are curious to experience in a human life. Not something that fights to take away parts of my human experience.
The reflection of not knowing when something was your last. And accepting that some things will never happen again.
Read the original motivation for my monthly monologue writing project here:
The last topic (not knowing when a time is your last) reminds me of dating. I had many moments on dates where I realized this was the last time I would ever see this person. In some instances, I wanted that to be the case, but it was still a startling realization.