During an interview at Business Insider's IGNITION conference in New York, Snapchat's VP of Content, Nick Bell, walked through all the changes coming up in the app's biggest redesign. Following is a transcript of the video.
Nick Bell: What we’ve really done here is double down on what has made Snapchat great today but simplified it. And I think, you know, you look at it now, there are three screens. As Evan said, you open up the camera, we think that really aids self-expression and it's the kind of blinking cursor of the new mobile age.
On the left-hand side, you have the friend feed and I think what's key here is that the conversation with your best friend was happening on the left-hand side anyway. It’s where you were chatting with your friends but it was slightly awkward because the stories from your friends were appearing on the other side of the camera and therefore you were occasionally missing some of those stories from your best friends. So by creating one page where all of that lives together simplifies it and we think is going to really aid that conversation and the relationship with your friends.
Then on the right-hand side, we now have much more prominent, much more real estate for premium content from our publishers and media partners, which I think is going to be really exciting and is going to aid the discovery of new content for people.
The other thing that it’s done is allowed us to, as Evan said, separate the social from the media because we know the relationship that you have with your friends is very different to the relationship you have with content. And I think what’s happened traditionally with news feeds is those two have been blurred together and the signals that were indicating this content you were seeing was based on your friends.
But what's actually kind of interesting is that although I’ve got great relationships with my friends, my interests are personal to me and not personal to my friend. So just because my friends like skateboarding doesn't mean I like skateboarding. So here, by separating these two aspects out, we think it's a much cleaner solution and we think that actually what's going to happen is we're going to be able to optimize the two experiences. One to focus on relationships and one to focus on interest.