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.