Liz Gerber

Welcome or welcome back to the technical difficulties podcast where we celebrate the careers of amazing female designers and technologists. We are so excited to welcome Dr. Mira Dontcheva. She's a one-of-a-kind leader in human-computer interaction, creativity, video creation, audio creation, image creation, and artificial intelligence. As a senior principal scientist at Adobe, she and her team build new tools that help make video and audio creation easier, more fun, and more accessible to a wider audience.

Mira not only builds things, she also writes things. She has written and edited No Code Required, giving user tools to transform the web. We can't wait to hear from Mira. Mira, thank you so much for joining us today.

Mira Dontcheva

Thanks so much for having me, Liz. It's so exciting to be part of this podcast.

Liz Gerber

Thank you. So we're going to start with a few quick warm up questions. And the first one is your favorite way to start your morning.

Mira Dontcheva

My favorite way to start my morning is to walk my daughter to school.

Liz Gerber

Okay, why?

Mira Dontcheva

Because it's about a 10 minute walk to school, 10 minute walk back. We live on a hill, so getting there is really easy and then coming back, know, gotta like huff and puff. But I love it because we're outside, we're moving, we're walking. We live in Seattle, so you can do it pretty much year round. And it gives us some quiet time to just talk about whatever. And sometimes we don't talk about anything. Sometimes she tells me silly things like, Mom, I have a schedule on my recesses. Recess one, I play with these friends. Recess two, I play with this friend. Recess three, I play freeze tag. And I'm like, huh, okay. Anyway, so it's just, I love it because we get to be outside. It's a great way to start the day. And then also she tells me things that she might not otherwise.

Liz Gerber

She has a schedule. I love that. Okay, next question. Your favorite creativity tool.

Mira Dontcheva

Oof. Gosh, I think I would have to like show you my notebook. Like notebook, paper and pencil. Like I think, you know, you can, I don't even want to show you my netbook, but like I don't really draw on the lines, you know, like it's all over the place. It's sideways. You know, you can, you know, yeah, it's it. Paper and pencil.

Liz Gerber

Paper and pencil even though you make all these sophisticated tools.

Mira Dontcheva

Well, sorry, whiteboard. I love the whiteboard too. So I need more space. The notebook's not big enough. So yeah, I know, right? Even though we make these great digital tools, I love physicality. So in fact, that's one of the things I'm always thinking about is like, how do I not use the computer? Partly it's because I use the computer all day. And so I don't wanna use the computer for everything. But yeah, I... we make great digital tools and they're still not as great as physical tools. And so that's part of the challenge is how do we make the digital experience as compelling, as effective as paper and pencil.

Liz Gerber

I love it. So you've used these tools throughout the day and now you need to end the day. So what's your favorite way to end the day?

Mira Dontcheva

It's the same, I write to journal. I also like to, I mean, it's not so much a creativity tool, but I play a lot of wordle, spangram, know, like word games, like little small things to just kind of unwind.

Liz Gerber

Awesome!

Yeah. Awesome, so you do those right before the end of the day. What's your best game? What do think you're best at?

Mira Dontcheva

Wordle I'm pretty good at. I can usually get it in like three or four tries. Three. Three, I have a good strategy. Connections and Spangram, those ones I'm not as good at. feel like my like common knowledge of the world, my like, I feel like connections, if you know a lot of stuff about music or movies, like pop culture, you're better at it. I am not very good at pop culture. I'm not a great trivia partner for things like pop culture. I would be good for like math, physics, maybe art. Although again, I'm not great with like names, you know, such and such artists, good guess, you know. I know the big names, but none of them modern. You know, I'm not as like caught up on all the people.

Liz Gerber

Are you familiar with Taylor Swift?

Mira Dontcheva

Come on. Yes.

Liz Gerber

Okay. Okay. Okay. Okay. Moving on. And wait, are you willing to share? Cause this might be the most valuable part of the podcast. Your strategy on Wordle.

Mira Dontcheva

My strategy for what?

Liz Gerber

For Wordle.

Mira Dontcheva

Oh, yes. So I have…

Liz Gerber

Or is it top secret?

Mira Dontcheva

It's not top secret. I'm happy to let all of your listeners feel good about their wordle strategy. So my first word, first guess is always the same. I start always with trail because I want to be outside hiking. And so I feel like it is a representation of me to start my wordle experience with the word trail.

Liz Gerber

Oh, I love that. So it's not just about the frequency of the letters. It's also about how you want to feel and your ideal self. Beautiful.

Mira Dontcheva

Yes. Yes. So it's a good word because it has A and I, you know, has some common consonants. Anyway, so that's the first one. From there, I try to use as many vowels as possible next. So an E, if I can use an E or an O, that's good. So that's my general strategy. I, unlike the Wordle bot, which is trying to maximize winning quickly by like guessing a word that is definitely not the word but is going to maximize the information gain, what I do is always try to guess the winning word. So if there are letters in there that it's told me, you have to use this letter but it's in the wrong place, I'll always use it, even though a better strategy might be to pick a word that doesn't include that letter because then you learn more about other letters.

Liz Gerber

Okay, so I think we can translate this into your philosophy about life. How does this inform your philosophy about life? I think that's what you're talking about. I think this is not just a wordle strategy. This is like, what do you really maximize in life?

You were talking about kind of whether you should maximize for efficiency or in some ways I think the contracts was like maximize for learning and joy. That's what I heard you saying. You want to, you start with a word that's really about setting the tone. I'll let you speak.

Mira Dontcheva

Yeah, so I agree. So it is definitely representative of my philosophy on life. First, I'm picking a word I love, right? Trail. So I wanna be, I do believe words have meaning and influence. So I'm careful about the words I use day to day, about how I frame things, how I think about things. So trail is a good one. It's aspirational. It makes me happy to think about it, being on a trail. But then I think, my goal is to win. And so I want every guest to have a chance of winning, right? But I also want to like maximize my chance. I'm using vowels to do that. So I would say, yeah, I think that's the strategy, right? Because when you follow what the Wordlebot does is you're

Liz Gerber

Oh, interesting. Okay.

Mira Dontcheva

So I would say, yeah, I think that's the strategy, right? Because when you follow what the Wordlebot does is you're, you're giving up winning to gain information. And sometimes you win by chance. Like the other day, I won on the second guess, which is like really just lucky, right?

Liz Gerber

No, it's your intelligence, pure intelligence.

Mira Dontcheva

It's no. I was doing this with my husband and he was like, what? Like, cause I just guessed a word that he would not have guessed. And I think because it had like a Y in it, you you don't pick the Ys first.

Liz Gerber

Yeah.

Mira Dontcheva

Just like, you know, he was just like, you know, his strategy would have failed here, but my just guess, more, you know, I guess I lean in, maybe what it tells you is that I lean in on like, let's just try it and see if it works rather than like thinking it through too carefully when I do.

Liz Gerber

Okay, maybe that's what it is. You're at heart, you like to experiment.

Mira Dontcheva

Yeah.

Liz Gerber

Okay, this is resonating with what I know about you. Okay, we'll get back to experimentation in a little bit as a philosophy of life, but let's get to the origins of your career first and maybe experimentation plays a role. But the first question we wanna know is how did you get started in technology and design? Was there a, I'm a designer moment or I should be in tech moment or was it more in retrospect? Tell us more about your story.

Mira Dontcheva

Yeah, yeah, I actually don't think there was a moment. I think it's just part of who I am. It's just part of my identity. I did grow up in a house. My mom is an electrical engineer. My dad is a mathematician. So it's a very much like kind of a build kind of house, but also a, you know, we like problem solving kind of house. But also it was interesting watching them interact,

growing up because my dad is very abstract, you know, he would like write theorems on a piece of paper and and he would have pages and pages of math formulas while my mom was building electronics for cars and so they you know, they are kind of similar in some ways, but also very very different.

My dad is an academic, wrote papers. My mom, again, worked in industry, you know, had to deliver products, work with customers, work with teams all over the world, right? Very different kind of day to day lives.

Liz Gerber

Yeah.

Mira Dontcheva

But I, I, so that's the house I grew up in. And, you know, I loved Legos from very early on. like in a teenager, I was like doing embroidery because I really liked embroidery. In high school, loved photography. Spent a ton of time in the dark room. So like the combination of engineering, science, and art was always in my life. then, so when it was time to pick a major, pick a degree, I wanted to do both. And so I ended up in computer science where I really wanted to do computer graphics. I wanted to build virtual worlds. I wanted to essentially take the computers and build graphical images, visual images, and that's kind of what set me on this trajectory. And I continue to have this duality of like, I like building, I like math and science, but I really, I wanna be doing it for visual things. I had kind of a crisis of confidence in grad school and considered switching from computer graphics to networking and systems because I really liked that faculty member and thought it could be a great career or great way, great person to work with. But then I thought about the problems and the work I would do and I was just like, I really like interaction. I really like visuals. That's where I need to be. So that's been kind of the through and through always.

Liz Gerber

But it sounds like people have played a pretty important role for you as well.

Mira Dontcheva

Yes. Oh, absolutely. Like I think, um, I always say that I can get excited about any problem given the right mix of people. I mean, you know, even networking, even like figuring out how fast your network is and we can build visualizations of that. You know, we can make that visual, but, but like the most exciting problem can be killed by a team that's not working well together. And so absolutely. Like people matter more to me than..

Liz Gerber

Yeah. Yeah.

Mira Dontcheva

Than the problems. But I do think I want to be excited about what I'm working on. And that's a combination of the problems we're working on and how important they are in the world. And then also, who is this work happening with?

Liz Gerber

Yeah. So building on that, one of the things I'd love to hear more about for you, and you've worked on hundreds of projects, so this will be hard to choose, but what is one that stands out as most rewarding and why? Doesn't have to be the most rewarding, but why? Was it something about the people, something about the project, something about the scale of the potential impact?

Mira Dontcheva

You're asking me to like pick my favorite child. It's like.

Liz Gerber

I really am. Or a child. How about just name a child that you have. Or just one that brings a smile to your face. Or if you were to see a photo of it or see it in use, you'd be happy and why.

Mira Dontcheva

Right.

Um.

Liz Gerber

And you can describe the projects we've worked on together if you want.

Mira Dontcheva

I have two that come to mind, and so I'll tell you about both. They're very, very different. So when I first joined Adobe, this is like very early days, we were working on, actually the work you and I were doing back then is coming back, but that's a different topic. I'll add that as our third, more like exciting frontiers coming next.

Liz Gerber

Okay.

Mira Dontcheva

One that comes up for me is when I joined Adobe, I was trying to figure out what to do because I had been doing all this work on the web for my thesis work. And here I was joining Adobe, which a lot of people from the outside were like, why are you going to Adobe? You should be going to Google. Like all your thesis work was about search templates. Like why are you, what are you doing there? And I was like, oh, but I really like Adobe's tools. They're really fun. And so.

My first kind of research thread at Adobe was all about, well, people are using the web to learn how to use our tools all the time. How do we like take all that great stuff that's on the web, bring it into the software? How do we help people with these really complicated, you know, expert level pieces of software like Photoshop? And so we did a lot of work on all different things from interactive tutorials to better search interfaces that like get you to different parts of the UI to

voice interfaces that could be like little shortcuts for parts of the UI to games. I thought like games for learning could be really fun. And that body of work at that time was too early. Like Adobe was like, we must build more features.

Liz Gerber

Yes, you were so ahead of your time. were ahead of your time, like thinking about game, gamification and learning embedded in software. Yeah, very ahead.

Mira Dontcheva

Yeah.

And so, nothing happened with it. And my job as a researcher in industry is to develop new technologies and get into product. So just developing it is not enough. You also want to put into product. Otherwise, why are we at Adobe? Could be at a university. And so what was amazing to see is about five years later, all of a sudden,

Liz Gerber

Mm-hmm.

Mira Dontcheva

You know, Adobe started paying more attention to the onboarding experience and all those new users coming in and having a hard time. And all that work became relevant. And so all of our products now have much better, much better onboarding experiences and have great, you know, both search experiences, but also just the ability to like help guide you through how to get started. And a lot of that, you know, product work. I was informed by the research we did. So it was really great to see that work make its way into product. So that was a really good, for me, like a good feeling, like, oh, I worked on a problem that mattered, and I did it early enough that we could do the research, have time to do it, and then it could inform what the products could do.

Liz Gerber

Very cool.

Mira Dontcheva

So that's one. Another one is very, very different. worked on that. We, Adobe Research at one point was trying to incubate products. And so I worked on a project called Project Blink where we built a web-based video editor that was powered by AI technologies. So we had transcript-based editing and visual search. And the idea was, how do we make video editing really easy for everyone? We knew there were a lot of people who are just super intimidated by editing interfaces today. And that's because the timeline, the timeline we know and love is just, it's scary. It's scary for people. And so we said, well, what if we didn't have a timeline? What if it was just text-based editing? Could you get everyone, like people who are using, who are recording more and more video to actually feel comfortable editing?

And so we worked on that and it just so happened that the pandemic happened. And so a lot more people started doing video calls. And then you started having people at companies like Adobe who were never trained in video, who are all of a sudden having to deal with these recordings and wanting to like cut out parts and share them with different teams. And so it was really cool to see them like realize that, my gosh, like all of the skills I have around document editing, like I could just use those same skills for video editing and it's not hard, right? It's really just a different way to edit. And so it was really, really fun. know, we built it, worked with a really great team. I think that was among the biggest highlights was the team was amazing. we, yeah, we brought it out and I shared it on Adobe Labs, got a lot of feedback, and now we're working with our product teams to productize those ideas and get them out into the world. So it was a good, it was a really good experience of basically doing almost like a little startup inside of a big company and operating in a very different way from the way we typically operate in research.

Liz Gerber

That's great. Thank you for sharing those stories. I'm hearing a lot about kind of patience in research and waiting for it to be relevant and believing that it will be relevant is very important.

Mira Dontcheva

Yeah, and so I have my third one for you. One more. So our research together back then when I first started at Adobe was all around priming an emotion and how that affects the creative process. And we always said, you know, Adobe's making creative tools, yet the experience of the creative tool is the same for everyone, no matter how they're feeling, no matter when they're using it, beginning of the day, end of the day. And I think those same ideas are coming back again, Liz, because it's the AI agents time. In fact, if you wanna do a project together, I think we should do that one, right?

Liz Gerber

Let's do it.

Mira Dontcheva

Like what if we revisit that priming emotion work, but now with AI agents, you know? All right, here we go, next project.

Liz Gerber

I love it. Done. Okay. On a podcast developed. But keeping in mind our audience, I'm going to transition onto you've done so many successful projects, but obviously not everything has probably gone perfectly as you, as you have already alluded to, there may be a five year delay until something was implemented.

Mira Dontcheva

Right.

Liz Gerber

Just so to give our audience a sense that everything doesn't go perfectly, are you willing to share a surprising, maybe a surprising moment in your journey that people wouldn't expect of a very successful technologist and designer like you? Was there something that was defining that maybe it was hard in the moment, but you look back on as a learning experience that you're willing to share?

Mira Dontcheva

I don't have a very specific example for you, but I will give you kind of more of a broad theme that I feel like has come up more and more now that I lead a team. But also as we do bigger projects, is I have found that actually people problems are much harder to solve than technical problems or design problems. And that's...

A bit of a shock, honestly, and I don't know if it's because I grew up in a math and science house where, you know, we were always building things and solving the formula, right? Building the car. But like I always was like, oh, the hard thing. And again, in grad school, right, you're solving a technical problem. Here's this hard unanswered problem that we're going to go off and solve. And what I've learned having to work with many different people and different combinations of things is that actually getting people to work together well is really way harder than solving the problem. that's motivating people to do things that are good for them, also really hard sometimes. So I'm sure you run into this at the university quite a lot, but really I find I spend way more time trying to figure out how to deal with this challenging person-people situation rather than than I ever expected.

Liz Gerber

A computer programmer, at Google once said to me, I'll never forget it, quite cynically, he said, people are my least favorite kinds of bugs. And it just, thought, wow, okay, people as bugs, bugs as in a computer programming, bug. They stymied him the most, right?

Mira Dontcheva

Yeah.

Yeah. So I guess for all of the listeners, you especially those students who are working in project teams together, that probably resonates a lot, right? Like if you have an amazing team, it's so much fun to work together. You get so far, but then sometimes that doesn't work for whatever reason. And I just think you got to like, just do your best, do your best with the situation.

and figure out. am, I actually, will tell you, I'm reading this book right now called Super Communicators that's kind of interesting. I don't know if you've read it.

Liz Gerber

Oh yeah,. Yeah, and I've heard this guy speak. Yep.

Mira Dontcheva

Yeah, so it's all about people who are really easy to talk to and everybody really connects with. And I've experienced this, you know, I feel like when you and I met, you know, we clicked right away. And so I always thought it was when you meet somebody and you click, it's not one or the other person. I always thought it was like more of a, I just, I'm super aligned with certain people. And so once we meet, you know, we just hit it off. But what this book argues is that there are people who do this with everyone and they are the super communicators. And so he kind of lays out what makes them so good at this. And so maybe your students could learn something about that. I don't know. I'm finding it really interesting because he breaks down communication in like three different kinds of conversations. And so if you can in the moment identify what kind of conversation you're having and what the other person, how they're oriented, that can help you make a connection and hopefully kind of move forward more easily.

Liz Gerber

What kind of communication are we having right now? Do you remember in his model?

Mira Dontcheva

Uhhh...

I think it's the social one. Yeah, there's like three. I think it's a social one.

Liz Gerber

I think so too. Yeah.

Mira Dontcheva

Yeah, there's like three. I think it's a social one.

Liz Gerber

That feels right. Okay, you're always learning, Mira, and that's something I've always admired about you. So what's one thing you're learning how to be a super communicator, or at least learning about them? What's one thing you still want to learn and do?

Mira Dontcheva

So I wrote this on my list here, because I knew you were going to ask me this question. Well, learning, I guess, I'm learning a lot about storytelling broadly, which is a new theme in my lab, which is how do we create stories. We're focused on video stories, but I would say I'm interested in storytelling more broadly. Just how do people tell stories? Because that's what we do all day in some sense. We tell stories, and storytelling is such a kind of key part of who we are as humans. But so beyond that, it's more of like a personal and professional interest. I wanna learn to play guitar. It's something that I used to do. I used to take lessons way in high school, but right now my family is becoming very musical. My husband has acquired a new drum kit. So there's a lot of drumming going on in my house. My son is also in the band. My daughter's singing. So I think there's a desire for a family band. And I think I want my job to be the guitar player. So that requires, you know, learning how to relearning really guitar, cause they don't want me to sing. I'm not allowed to sing. So it's going to have to be an instrumental. I want a melodic role. So it has to be, I think guitar.

Liz Gerber

Okay, so I've got a friend who's both a computer scientist who does research in machine learning and a musician. And he's terrified that musicians are not going to be needed anymore. So I'd be curious as somebody who works in the space of creativity tools, is it worth your time to learn the guitar?

Mira Dontcheva

Definitely, because I'm not trying to be a professional musician, right? I'm just trying to have fun with my family.

Liz Gerber

Okay.

Mira Dontcheva

But I would say, I think my personal take is that, yes, you are going to have these AI-generated music. You're going to have AI-generated music, for sure. But I think what hopefully that means is that we'll have better content like the everyday content that we all look at and listen to will be just better because there'll be more diversity in the kinds of music that people put in because right now It's not like I'm hiring a professional musician to create me a background track for my you know conference video no, I'm pulling something off stock and It's the sounds the same whether it's yours or mine or your colleagues. They all sound the same So be nice if there's some diversity, I still can't imagine us not having professional musicians who create amazing music. Like I just, I think the AI models are far from that. So I'm not worried, but I'm not a professional musician. So maybe, maybe it's, it's a little bit naive, but I will also tell you, I mean, I just, in fact, this morning was chatting with some of our creatives who are using our AI tools and they still feel like there's, you know, there's a lot of work to do there.

They're not. Tools are opening up some great new possibilities, but I think they're going to be, it's going to be part of existing workflows, right? I think creative jobs may change a bit in that they'll have new tools that they use as part of the work they do, but I think we're still far from a place where we're just not going to have any creative professionals.

Liz Gerber

Yeah, I'm teaching a class on designing with AI, which has been so much fun to work with the students and understand what their perception is. I agree with you. agree with you. Okay, so we got to wrap up. I want to be sensitive to your time. So the last question I'm going to end with is what unexpected or expected advice do you have for those entering your field? What kind of advice would you give?

Mira Dontcheva

So I have two pieces of advice. The first one is probably more for your more technical students, because I would expect your design students to already be thinking about this. But always focus on the customer. Remember the customer. Think about their pain points. What are their needs? I know there's a lot of shiny, amazing tech out right now.

But what problem is it solving, right? How are people gonna use it? How are they gonna actually use it in the thing they're trying to accomplish? So that's like number one, focus on the user, always be thinking about them. And then the second one is something that someone told me a number of years ago, which was get comfortable being uncomfortable. And it was something that was really unintuitive to me. But what this executive said to me is look,

The more senior you become in your career, the less clear decisions become. You no longer know what the right path is. And so you'll often come across situations where you have to make the decision, but it's not clear. And you don't have time to get more data, or maybe more data is not gonna help. And so you just have to make a decision and it's gonna feel really uncomfortable.

And that's just life. Like you're just going to experience that like a lot more as a senior, as a senior person. And so I think that's something that's been definitely the case for me is there's more and more of these decisions that I'm like, I don't know, like what, what should I do? And so I'm one of my former managers, one, one way to alleviate the like, ah, what to do is to, to think about every decision is, is this a one way door or a two way door? Like,

Once I walk through this door, how hard is it going to be to come back? We talk about hiring decisions, for example, as one way doors. you can, once you hire somebody, you're committing, you know, a lot of time. know, two way doors are more like, well, should I use this library or this library? Well, you know, can use this library. If it doesn't work, we can switch, right? The cost is not as big. So, so yeah, those would be, that would be my advice.

Liz Gerber

So you are somebody that is a curator of amazing podcasts and I always look to you for great advice. Are there any final recommendations for online courses or workshops or books or podcasts that you feel like are particularly good for folks starting out in the field?

Mira Dontcheva

I would say I have some favorite podcasts. No Stupid Questions is a really good one because it's just like a mix of everyday things as well as just some human psychology, which is great. And then Hard Fork has been a really recent favorite for me because I find it very hard to keep up with everything that's going on in the tech world right now.

Liz Gerber

Okay.

Mira Dontcheva

and they do a really good job of giving me a sense for what's happening, but diving deep enough that I have some information.

Liz Gerber

Awesome. Thank you so much, Mira. Thank you for sharing your time and your stories with us. And thank you to the audience for listening to Technical Difficulties. The podcast was produced by the Center for Human Computer Interaction and Design and the McCormick School of Engineering at Northwestern University. Thank you. Bye bye.

Mira Dontcheva

Thank you so much. Thanks.