What’s in a name?

One of the more challenging tasks I faced when starting my company was coming up with a great name for my product. It had to be short, memorable, at least somewhat descriptive, and of course the URL had to be available.

 I started by writing down all the words that describe the product I wanted to build. Words like family, social networking, connect, share, stories, unite, etc. Someone already owned the domain for many of my early ideas. My husband came up with combining kin and connection. Since I’m a good southern girl, I was very familiar with using kin to describe family and my site was designed to connect families. So Kinnection was born. Luckily, the domain was free. There are other sites with similar domain names which is obviously not ideal, but I’m still happy with it.

The name tested pretty well with my focus group but there were some who couldn’t figure out what the site was about so I decided to come up with a tag line. I know this is probably obvious for many people who have done this before but at Microsoft, there is a whole army of people who take care of branding so this was my first time. The tag line I came up with was: “Share memories. Stay connected.” I think both the name and the tag line will stick but you never know what will come up during our alpha.

Designing Kinnection

I started working on the overall design for Kinnection around October 2006. I was a program manager for years at Microsoft so designing products is something I really enjoy. I knew I would need a lot of graphical support and inspriation, so I contacted a former collegue at Filter Design Studios in Bellevue, WA. Robin set me up with an amazing designer who was responsible for the site look and feel, logo design, interaction model, and screen designs for the major functionality. I thoroughly enjoyed working my designer on Kinnection. He really listened to my description of my target customer and overall user experience goals. We meet weekly for a little over a month and the results in my opinion were amazing. We even held some informal focus group testing on the site branding and logo designs. Too fun! Once most of the high-level details were hammered out, Mike and I started coding around the beginning of December 2006.