Part 2: Mystery Skype: from meme to platform in three weeks

The second part of our blog series about how we built a new teaching community around an existing user behaviour on Skype in the classroom. Read parts 1 and 3.

In our first blog post about Mystery Skype, we talked about the meme origins of Mystery Skype and why teachers and students love this educational game. We also discovered the problems that they face when playing Mystery Skype. In this blog post we'll talk about how we made the Mystery Skype experience better for teachers on Skype in the classroom.

Amazing map! RT @POPCSPeterson Our 1st #MysterySkype was awesome! Thanks to @MsDomsClass very cool class! http://t.co/7awizpHkmM
— @MysterySkype September 21st, 2013 21:05

How can we help make Mystery Skype a better experience for teachers?

Bearing in mind that Mystery Skype is often the first Skype lesson teachers try, it became obvious that creating a special Mystery Skype space for teachers would generate more sign ups to the Skype in the classroom service. It would also allow teachers who were edtech novices to become braver about introducing Skype to students.

Our three main findings formed the ingredients for our design process. Since the initial ‘sketches’ of Mystery Skype had already been done by teachers (in the form of online spreadsheets, blog posts with advice and videos of Mystery Skype in action), we proceeded to expand these ideas and give shape to a space that would become the main reference point for teachers looking to get more out of their Mystery Skype experience.

We created a Mystery Skype hub which would accomplish these aims:

Inform teachers about Mystery Skype, signing up and setting up their first call. This includes advice from Mystery Skype experts, photos of Mystery Skype in action and checklists for your first call
Give teachers access to an international database of fellow Mystery Skype classrooms that they can easily contact via email or Twitter

For this page, we introduced Twitter messaging to the Skype in the classroom service to allow faster communication with teachers. All information on Mystery Skype was co-created with our teachers and supported with direct quotes from their interviews.

@orlyr78, I found you on @SkypeClassroom - would you like to arrange a #MysterySkype with my class? https://t.co/0gqsvD77xv
— @mrslrausch September 10th, 2013 22:32

Launching Mystery Skype would however not be as easy as expected. Because we were introducing an existing product to the people who had designed it, as well as to the larger community of 75,000+ users on the Skype in the classroom website, we had to devise a strategy that would allow us to do this in such a way that would not disrupt the existing Mystery Skype community but also introduce those new to the game to our new website feature.

In our final blog post about Mystery Skype, we'll talk about how we launched this new feature on the Skype in the classroom website and how it has been received thus far.