Personas can be useful. They give us something real to design for.
It’s easier to think about a stressed student who journals twice a week than the messier reality of the actual person.
But real users, remind me of a metaphor: personas are cars, not boxes. They tell us who’s in the vehicle, but not always who’s driving. We like tidy categories, but people can be ever changing, and that’s kind of the point.
Personality Hacker does a deep dive into this as MBTI functions (you can look into this for a bit more context): passengers in a car. Everyone has the same four passengers:
• There’s a Driver: the part of you that you lean on the most.
• A Co-pilot: supportive, second-in-command.
• A 10-year-old: sometimes helpful, sometimes sulky.
• A 3-year-old: cute but chaotic, probably best they don’t steer.
Everyone has all four. What changes is who has their hands on the wheel.
Take the stressed student again. On a good day, they might be their “power user” self, with Driver and Co-pilot running the show. They log in daily. Exploring features. Use the product as expected.
But throw in stress, boredom, or late-night overthinking, and suddenly the 10-year-old or even the 3-year-old grabs the wheel. That’s when you see bingeing at 2 a.m., ghosting for weeks, or using a feature in a way you never imagined.
That doesn’t make the persona wrong. It makes it alive.
So maybe the question isn’t “Which persona is this user?” but “Which passenger is driving right now?”
Because if design can flex for that, we’re building for real people. In all their honest messiness.