Last week, I finished my book.
This means that everything—intro, chapters, front and back matter, foreword, cover art—is submitted and locked for launch with Rosenfeld Media.
It’s fitting that this milestone coincides with the 100th episode of this newsletter, because the deceptively simple act of writing something for an audience on a regular cadence played a non-trivial role in bringing this book into existence.
📖 What’s What Your Machines Should Do about?
My book is a field guide for design and product decision-makers navigating AI automation, helping you steer technology to extend human capabilities and drive business results. That means closing the Automation Strategy Gap, where aspirations of fully automated futures become disconnected from organizational readiness and customer value.
You'll gain frameworks and tools to set deliberate direction (where your organization is going and why), directed progression (how to sequence automation rollout to get there), and grounded tactics (day-to-day decisions about how to automate). 👉🏼 Read more here.
Origin Stories
I published my first Substack on October 11, 2023.
I had recently quit my in-house principal UX researcher job at Meta Reality Labs to build my own design research practice. Bundled into this new endeavor was a strong yet simultaneously vague aspiration: Write a book.
Perhaps it would be something about design research for emerging technologies, where I had focused across my career.
Maybe I’d write about what’s the same and different about conducting research for spatial computing products versus “traditional” 2D interfaces.
Or maybe, it would be something about how we navigate building for this (relatively) new kid on the block, generative AI, that seemed like the next big thing for HCI since the Mother of All Demos in 1968.
I didn’t know exactly where to start, other than I needed to start writing.
I also knew I was prone to both the delicious prospect of endless rabbit-holding (risk: never choosing your topic) and the deep-seated perfectionism of a classical music upbringing (risk: endless iteration).
Because of that, having a regular date where I hit “publish” (or more specifically, “send to everyone now”) and an audience was non-negotiable.
I poked around a bit on platform options and ended up choosing Substack. I needed a low barrier to entry plus built-in discoverability. The platform fit the bill well enough.
Getting to the Point (of View)
Writing wasn’t entirely new to me.
Seventeen peer-reviewed publications and five patents in, I knew the drill when it came to academic or technical writing.
In those forums, you have a well-established structure (for example: intro, methods, results, discussion, general discussion, conclusion). You also have a fairly clear direction about what the piece will be (though that rarely makes the blank page easier).
This was not that.
Having the obligation to populate a blank page every week is both an incredible privilege and a curse. (And yes, “weekly” was my initial self-imposed cadence for over a year; I’ve since moved to biweekly to juggle other priorities).
Where would I start? I decided that writing about stuff I was doing and reading was a reasonable starting place.
My first four episodes were indeed that: digests of events I attended (I went to a lot of them in those first few months of founding my consultancy, Sendfull).
Around then, I noticed I was developing an opinion about things.
By episode 5, in part inspired by a client project on an augmented reality (AR) system at the time, I had Something To Say: We need to stop treating AR like it emerged from nowhere.
We’ve been designing heads-up displays for decades, with an accompanying wealth of aviation human factors research that we can learn from to inform modern AR design (you’ll notice exactly this stance in my book: how decades of work on designing automated systems can inform AI automation decisions).
I had been applying that literature for over a decade in my design research work, but only through the act of staring down a blank page every week did I start articulating my point of view.
A Thesis Emerges
Episode 14 was called, Why we need a new design framework for building gen AI.
This was the concrete seed of core concepts that became a peer-reviewed paper I published at EPIC People later that year (and now, my book).
The basic thesis was that we need to start with understanding technology capabilities (“could you do it?”) and marry that with user value (“should you do it?”). I’d subsequently developed a corresponding toolkit grounded in systems thinking, hands-on intuition building, and a human-factors-informed 2x2 (the Cognitive Offloading Matrix) to help you answer those two questions.
Those same questions now serve as the axes of a keystone framework in my book, the Autonomy Decision Matrix, which is a map for deciding how to automate.
I’d go on to evolve the framework and tools from my EPIC paper into a playbook for how to automate through consulting and teaching. These efforts eventually culminated in me emailing Lou Rosenfeld a book proposal that would become What Your Machines Should Do.
Long-Term Side Effects
It’s worth mentioning that writing on Substack wasn’t only about developing this thesis, at least not in the strict sense of the word. Once I’d been writing regularly for several months, I improved at strategically nerding out pointing topics in ways that could complement my consulting and teaching practice. For instance:
Preparing for a speaking event via a literature review or landscape analysis, like this piece on generative AI’s role in extended reality accessibility, ahead of an Augmented World Expo panel.
Building out easily-accessible materials for my teaching practice.
Developing the scaffolding for new courses, such as Designing Future Systems (thoughts: part I and part II).
Working in the open and sharing primarily research that informed my new UX for AI course.
After enough repetitions, I also started noticing a pull: Once I’d spotted a pattern and it reached an inexplicable threshold (maybe it was thematic saturation, idk), a ‘sensemaking needed’ lightbulb would go off. I knew I needed to write about it.
I’d quickly find my thesis and the draft would flow (my forward-deployed UXR episode is one example). What happens if I keep doing this for another three years? Another decade?
What’s Next
One-hundred episodes and one book later, I’m rethinking what this newsletter will become.
I’m experimenting with an alternating cadence of practitioner spotlights (I do this in my book and it resonated with my tech reviewers) and long-form essays about UX, automation, and strategy. If you have qualitative feedback to complement my quant dashboard metrics, I’d love to hear from you in the comments.
In the meantime, I want to leave you with five learnings for writing more:
Write regularly. Set a cadence and stick with it. Put it in your calendar. Find an accountability buddy. Whatever it takes to make writing a regular part of your life.
It doesn’t have to be long. Clearly, I struggle with this. But you can start small, and that makes the mountain more like a mildly-steep sidewalk. Start with 100 words and adjust accordingly.
Lower the barrier to (text) entry. If typing into computers isn’t your thing, don’t force it. Use an old fashioned notebook. Brain dump into your phone’s Notes app using voice-to-text. Use sticky notes. Experiment. Just get it out of your head, somehow.
Share your work. This one feels especially scary because it is. What we publish on the internet lives forever. However, at least for me, this is the push I need to hone a piece. If you’re not ready for this yet, share it with a friend first. Or event text it to yourself and let it wait a day. It will look different tomorrow, I promise.
Expect discomfort. Know it will pass. Writing is Type 2 fun (also known as ‘fun’ to yours truly). It’s ambiguous and uncomfortable, almost continuously, until you hit publish.
Every Monday night (or Tuesday, or Wednesday) when I sit down to Thursday’s article, I think, “Ugh, why do I do this to myself?”
Yet, almost without fail, I find myself sharing a link to my much-clarified thoughts with clients or students or friends mere hours after publishing. I hold onto that for the next Wednesday night struggle.
Keep going. The newsletter provides.
🎉 Pre-order What Your Machines Should Do today for 15% off.
⏪ Recent Episodes
ep. 99. This is AI’s Dial-up Moment. What Kind of Internet do you Want to Build?
ep. 98. Putting the “Socio” Back in “Sociotechnical”
ep. 97. How an Embodiment Architect Designs for Physical AI
🚀 Sendfull in the Wild
Shift UX Conference (Brooklyn & Virtual)
What’s happening with UX?! Is it really dead? How do we evolve? Come join us at the Shift UX 2026 conference to collectively wrestle with these questions and chart a path forward.
I’m delighted to be one of the curators, leading the human-centered tooling track. Our other tracks include: research as strategy led by Jemma Ahmed, operations as orchestration led by Jon Fukuda, and systems-level thinking led by Abby Covert.
👉🏼 Read more about how I’m thinking about The Shift in this interview: What Will the Future of UX Actually Look Like?
✍️ Register for Shift UX 2026 here, virtual and IRL options available. Use HUTKA-SHIFT26 for $75 off.
EPIC 2026 Conference (Chicago)
This year’s EPIC Conference theme is Context: How do we model, predict, and interpret it to create value for people and business?
Join me and co-chair Todd Palmer for an immersive, hands-on learning day before the main conference, Building with Context: How to Translate Human-Centered Insights into Working Prototypes with Vibe Coding.
✍️ Register for EPIC 2026 here. Add on Building with Context before checkout.
💡 Fun Fact
While the field of UX might be shifting (shameless plug for the upcoming Shift UX conference), there’s evidence that “UX” is still the term for what we do.
An April 2026 Nielsen-Norman survey of 604 design and tech professionals supports that “UX” remains the default descriptor for the discipline. While there are other descriptors, they’re highly fragmented.
👉🏼 Full article: No New Name Has Replaced “UX”
That’s a wrap 🌯 . More on UX, automation, and strategy from Sendfull in three weeks!
Congratulations! And thanks for sharing your thoughts about writing. So far, I only wrote for myself. But knowing you makes me want to hit send some day!
Also looking forward to reading your book!
Congratulations, Stef! Huge achievement. Just pre-ordered and can’t wait to read.