Designing Multi Modal AI Experiences

A Preface

Still from the Storm music video: a crowd of students in uniform dancing
Storm
2026 single by Gener8ion featuring Yung Lean

Conversational design is similar to choreography.

You’re designing a dance between a human and a machine, where neither one fully controls the music.

The goal is to make the machine a good enough dance partner that the human never feels stepped on.

A large group of students in school uniform dancing in front of a brick building

Every conversational experience, regardless of modality, has the same underlying structure in simple terms:

  • The user has intent — they want something done, answered
  • The system must recognize that intent — through voice, text, gesture, or context.
  • The system responds — with words, actions, visuals, or silence.
  • The conversation advances or repairs — the dance continues, or someone stumbles and recovers.

My job is to juxtapose all four of these moments across every path a conversation can take, the happy paths, the confused paths, the frustrated paths, and the paths nobody predicted.