This is a tough question as it is quite broad. Imperial Germany was a vast place and riven with socioeconomic, regional and confessional cleavages. For instance, the economic boom after unification might be good for a hypothetical middle-class Prussian family would be bad for an Prussia-Polish migrant working in the Ruhr coal mines.
The following is a generalized account of the first two decades of unification.
An economic boom called the Gründerzeit characterized the first decade of unification. The increase in railroads and trade led middle-class Protestant families of Northern Germany to greatly improve their financial situation. This also saw the solidification of the great German industrial firms like Krupp, which began to amass more capital. The value of the East Elbian Junkers estates also rose in this period. Bot politically and culturally, these three groups (middle class Protestants, Junkers, and the industrial magnates) had a new, national prominence. This was partly by Bismarck's design. Although Bismarck's federal system had universal suffrage and other democratic feature, the system was rigged to favor these groups in subtle and not so subtle ways. An example of the former was the anti-socialist bills which prohibited socialist parties and the Kulturkampf against Catholic social and political institutions. While the intent of these bills was obvious, another subtle element of the Bismarkian system was that Reichstag deputies could not draw a salary. This inhibited independent political parties except those from established social networks.
The darker side to the Gründerzeit was the growth of large German metropolises such as Berlin or Hamburg. The ancien regime infrastructure of these cities was often unable to handle it and Germany experienced several waves of cholera pandemics. The reliance upon coal also led to environmental pollution and its attendant problems. The Imperial state was no friend of organized labor and there was little political recourse for those on the bottom of the socioeconomic ladder. the large industrial firms also exerted a great influence upon their workers to vote according to the interests of industry.
Imperial Germany also had a notable problem integrating its national ethnic and religious minorities. Although many Jews did assimilate to the new imperial culture, the state did not welcome their presence and casual antisemitism was very common within the state (which, to be fair, was the norm in Europe at this time). The newly acquired territories of Alsace and Lorraine had a very low level on national integration. Poles, whether migrants from Russian Poland, Austrian Galicia, or Prussia had very little place within the imperial structure. In Prussian Poland, the state tried to prohibit the sale of lands and estates to Poles and began a system of Germanizing education. The overbearing attitude in education culminated in a series of Polish riots in 1905, but the fuse had long since been lit. Polish workers in the Ruhr formed their own colony, but often could not join the emerging German socialist parties.
The older generation of historiography have emphasized that this unequal distribution of power led to an antidemocratic ethos within Germany that culminated the embrace of radical antidemocratic nationalism in the twentieth century. However, current historiography on Imperial Germany is qualifying this negative picture somewhat. Although Bismarck designed a system to be democratic in appearance, there were democratizing trends. Gradually, German voters managed to use the universal suffrage to extract a degree of leverage from the Bismarck's autocratic state. The Reichstag had the power over the budget and could use that as a club against the the federal executive which was not beholden to popular vote. The German court system remained sacrosanct and any attempt to curtail voting rights ran face first into German jurisprudence much like how African-Americans used the courts to repeal Jim Crow laws in the 1960s. SPD voters were often given handbooks explaining their rights and how to report them when they were being violated. Similarly, the new German economic and political elite often had a sense of nobless oblige. Bismarck introduced some of the first state programs for health insurance. This was not only an attempt to buy the votes of German workers, but was in keeping with his deeply-felt ethos as a Junkers aristocrat. The Protestant bourgeois culture also had a long shadow on German economic development and consumption as it prized higher quality material goods and craft over cheapness and quantity. Although Germany mass-produced goods, the importance of superior quality and German craft became quite important within the larger economy. Although it was initially a British protectionist measure against German imports, the mark "made in Germany" assumed a totemic status in Imperial Germany as a sign of craftsmanship.
Overall, unification brought a general prosperity that was not evenly divided. There was a greater sense of German identity, but there were significant problems with integrating the diverse German states as a whole. Finally, the political system was highly dysfunctional, but was becoming more democratic as the decades wore on.
sources
Anderson, Margaret Lavinia. Practicing Democracy: Elections and Political Culture in Imperial Germany. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2000.
Blackbourn, David. The Long Nineteenth Century A History of Germany, 1780-1918. New York: Oxford University Press, 1998.
Conrad, Sebastian. Globalisation and the nation in imperial Germany. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010.
Mommsen, Wolfgang J. Imperial Germany 1867-1918: politics, culture, and society in an authoritarian state. London: Arnold, 1995.