It’s a structured facilitated session that helps product teams decide which interface modality (voice, image, text, or a combination) fits their AI product before design begins. It runs on Anna Zarudzka's 5-test framework: Primary Task, Context-of-Use, Trust & Intimacy, Combination, and Failure Mode. The output is a decision document your designers and engineers can act on immediately.

Voice fits when the user's primary task is served by speaking – and when their hands, eyes, and environment support it. Voice fails when users came to your product for something else, when the context is screen-first, or when the product hasn't yet earned the level of intimacy that voice requires. The 5-test framework gives you a structured way to answer this for your specific product and user context.

Voice UI design focuses on a single input modality – what the interface says, how it listens, how it handles silence and misrecognition, and how it fails gracefully. Multimodal AI design combines two or more input types – voice, image, text, or audio – in ways that create something none of the individual modalities could achieve alone. The workshop identifies which approach fits – whether that's voice UX design for a single focused modality, conversational interface design across multiple touchpoints, or a fully multimodal experience combining inputs.

No formal brief required. It helps to come with a clear picture of who your users are, what they're trying to do, and what modality decisions are already on the table – but if those are still open questions, the workshop is designed to surface them. We'll send a short pre-session questionnaire once you book.

CPO or Head of Product is the core attendee. A product designer and a technical lead from your team make the session significantly more productive – the modality decision touches all three disciplines and alignment in the room means the decision document lands with the whole team behind it.

A clear written output covering: the chosen modality or combination of modalities, the rationale behind every choice scored against the 5 tests, the failure modes mapped for each modal decision, and a prioritised set of next steps for design and engineering. Built to be shared with stakeholders without additional explanation.

Yes. The facilitated Modality Strategy Workshop runs equally well in person or remote. The Modality Audit is primarily async with a structured review session at the end. For SCALE packages – Voice Interface Design Sprint and Multimodal AI Prototyping – we work in whatever setup fits your team's collaboration model.

If your team is ready to build, the SCALE packages take the decision document and turn it into a working prototype. If you need more time to align stakeholders internally before committing to a build, the decision document gives you exactly the material to do that. There's no obligation to continue with Boldare after the ASSESS or BUILD packages.