Dave Chen is senior director of UX Foundations & Enablement at 1Password, where he oversees user research, design systems, and design and research operations. He focuses on bridging user research and product design to scale highly secure, simple, and intuitive digital solutions. Before joining 1Password, Dave led multidisciplinary teams at companies like Flipp, General Mills, and Nielsen, building a background in consumer insights and market research. He holds an MBA from Wilfrid Laurier University and a Bachelor of Mathematics from the University of Waterloo. Outside 1Password, Dave writes on UX leadership and practical strategies (see Dear Danielle & Dave) to help UX teams build credibility, navigate organisational change, and scale their craft.
How to AI UXR is supported by Strella, an AI-powered customer research platform that partners with you to build, moderate, and synthesise interviews, allowing you to go from question to actionable insights in just a few hours.
In This Conversation
As AI tools become more entrenched across organisations, research leaders need to work out where AI should be used—and where it shouldn't. The answer to these questions is rarely a binary “yes” or “no.” Some parts of the research workflow are repetitive, time-consuming, and well-suited to automation; other parts benefit from AI as a thinking partner; while others depend on researchers’ relationships, judgement, and ability to read human nuance.
In this episode, Dave shares the framework his team at 1Password has developed to make those distinctions more navigable. Rather than treating AI adoption as a general mandate, the team maps the research workflow across three categories: automate, augment, and keep human. The result is a simple visual that will help you map an AI operating model.
The takeaway that encapsulates this conversation is this: rather than applying “AI everywhere” by default, AI becomes far more useful when teams decide through careful analysis of their work and systems where and when it best fits.
The How to AI UXR Map
This series builds on the insights shared in the How to AI UXR map, a five-page map that charts key trends, helps you pinpoint your AI maturity level, and offers practical, real-world applications you can adapt to your research systems.
In this episode, we cover:
Why the team divides research into three categories: what to automate, what to augment, and what to keep human.
How the framework helps researchers respond more thoughtfully to broad organisational pressure to apply AI everywhere.
Why repetitive, low-friction tasks, such as historical research lookup, can be strong candidates for automation when the right guardrails are in place.
How 1Password uses a custom Slack-based agent to help stakeholders find past research, reduce repeated requests to research teams, and surface areas where research may need to be refreshed.
Why tagging, coding, synthesis, and theming sit in the augment category rather than being treated as fully automated work.
How AI can help researchers notice patterns, test interpretations, and move through data more efficiently, while still requiring researchers to stay close to the evidence.
Why Dave’s team is cautious about synthetic users and AI moderation for the kinds of cybersecurity and enterprise research they conduct (and why Strella’s COO Priya Krishnan sees AI moderation as a distinct methodology rather than a lesser version of a human interview).
How the team is experimenting with AI-generated research outputs, including more visual and interactive internal reports built with Dust.
Why Dave advises research teams to start using AI tools in small, practical ways, learn what they’re good and bad at, and then decide where they fit in the research process.
Partway through the episode, as a leader building one of the tools these researchers are exploring and using, Priya Krishnan, the cofounder and COO of Strella, shares her take on the conversation.
Things Referenced
1Password is a password manager and secure access platform used by individuals, families, and organisations to manage passwords, passkeys, secrets, and other sensitive information.
Cursor is an AI-assisted code editor that helps users write, edit, and understand code.
Dust is an AI platform for creating custom assistants and AI-powered workflows.
Dust frames are interactive, website-like visual documents and dashboards created automatically by AI agents on the Dust platform (see above) that can present research findings in a more interactive, website-like format.
Synthetic users are AI-generated or AI-simulated research participants used to explore possible behaviours, reactions, or needs.
AI moderation refers to AI-led research interviews or conversations.
“I-Me-Mine AI” is The ResearchOps Review founder Kate Towsey’s phrase for individual, self-directed use of AI to augment personal work, as distinct from designing AI-enabled systems that operate across a team or organisation. Read “The Research Operating System Too Few Are Building: Why “I-Me-Mine AI” Isn’t Enough”.
Connect with the Guests
Dave Chen, Head of UX Research, Design System & UX Operations and cowriter of Dear Danielle and Dave.
Priya Krishnan, cofounder and COO of Strella
How to AI UXR is supported by Strella, an AI-powered customer research platform that partners with you to build, moderate, and synthesise interviews, allowing you to go from question to actionable insights in just a few hours.
