State Personas
Customer Experience has been built on the assumption that identity is stable. Personas persist, segments endure, and users behave consistently across time and context. This book argues that this assumption is not just outdated – it is structurally false.
Rather than treating identity as a fixed profile, State Personas reframes it as a momentary state emerging from signals, cognitive load, and environmental pressure. Decisions are not expressions of who someone is, but of what state they are in right now.
The book introduces a dynamic model of identity grounded in systems thinking, signal accumulation, and real-time interpretation. It explains why personalization based on history feels clumsy, why dashboards misread reality, and why products often respond to a user who no longer exists.
If your product speaks to a persona that isn’t there, it is speaking into a void.
State Personas teaches you to listen to signals instead.