The word on the street nowadays is that building a good product is no longer good enough. Marketers are convinced that products should evoke an entire lifestyle and way of being, and are falling over themselves to sell you the package deal. Lifestyle brands hawking a pantheon of products wrapped in an attitude have arrived in full force and have reimagined identity as a cart full of brand names. How can this possibly work?

We often talk about the User Experience when determining how people will use our products. The term has become so popular that the title of User Experience Engineer, or UX Engineer, has become somewhat commonplace.

Some design agencies now speak of extending the experience beyond just the product. The product is not enough, instead, one needs to extend design into what is called Life Experience design.

The premise of the philosophy is thus: you can design for the product experience and that is the experience you have when you interact with the product; you can design for the user experience which taken in its traditional sense really means the same thing as product experience - the user’s experience while they interact with a product; or you can design for life experience which is the experience the user gets with the context of a product in their lives.

How is Life Experience different from typical User Experience? Let’s take a look at some examples of how people actually do Life Experience Design and see if we can spot the differences.

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