Designing Your Life as the Ultimate Luxury Product 🔥

Hey Team! I know what you're thinking: "Marketing girl, we were expecting the newsletter first thing in the morning!" But this topic is close to my heart, so I wanted to do it right.

Luxury is all about minimal friction and maximum joy. And the way to get there is UX at its finest. So, if we're all eager to drop big bucks on luxury goods that do just that, why not apply the same UX principles to engineer a life of luxury for ourselves? Treat yourself like you're the latest, greatest, most buzzworthy product on the market. After all, you're the user experience that matters most.

Designing Comfort

If you're gonna design a user experience, why not start with the ultimate user—yourself? Think about glimmers as the delightful "micro-interactions" that keep users (ahem, you) coming back for more.

Glimmers are those moments that light up your neural dashboard. It's that colorful explosion when you level up in Candy Crush. It's not just about feeling good; it's about function. Deb Dana, the woman who introduced us to this nifty term, says that glimmers are those "micro-moments of safety, connection, regulation." In the startup world, that's what we call killer features. The first step to improve your life is to identify your glimmers.

Picture this: You're knee-deep in meetings, your inbox is a war zone, and suddenly—boom!—you take a sip of that perfect Nespresso shot. Life feels good, even if it's just for a second. That's a glimmer.

As an example, some of my glimmers are:

-> Waking up early (and not in a hurry)

-> Having a squeaky clean home (oh that coveted empty kitchen slab)

-> Nespresso (expensive but cheaper than coffee outside, I guess)

Glimmers Are NOT:

• Forced cheerfulness (toxic positivity? No, thanks!)
• Generic nice things like "chilling with family" (be specific, people!)
• Those 'it could be worse' thoughts (so not the same thing!)

The Bugs and Glitches: Meet Your Triggers 😬

If glimmers are your UX wins, then triggers are the bugs and glitches messing up your user flow. Waking up late, stuffing your day with back-to-back meetings, and let's not even mention metrics. Just like in product design, you've got to ID the bugs before you can squash 'em.

Identifying your triggers, or as I like to call them, your ‘dimmers’,

Action Plan: A/B Testing Your Life 📊

Ready to level up? Grab your phone and open a note. List out your glimmers and dimmers, the highlights and lowlights of your daily experience. This isn't just for kicks; it's emotional A/B testing. Watch how shifts in your day affect your overall UX. You're not just coasting through life; you're optimizing it. Keep this list at hand; don't finish it in a day, update it daily.

Some of my dimmers are:

• Having to walk my dog for less time than usual -> a 15' minute walk doesn't really take 15' minutes
• When the Uber takes too long to arrive -> I should leave earlier
• Not having a tidy desk -> I should get more storage

Wrap it Up

So here's the lowdown: Burnout is the enemy, luxury is the goal, and you're the user we're most concerned about. Let's put the same energy into fine-tuning our lives as we do our latest projects. And believe me, when you start looking at your life as the ultimate luxury product, those upgrades don't just feel indulgent, they feel necessary.

Sometimes we treat our glimmers as cute little bonuses we find along the way, and our dimmers as unforeseeable inconveniences, but if we design our lives for luxury, we'll find we can live our lives in much more comfort.

Who's ready to get intentional about life's little ups and downs? I bet it's you, team! 🌈

To living in luxury and dodging the bugs,

The Marketing Girl (who recently found out that releasing the newsletter late is a dimmer, so she should have done it sooner)