Skip to content

Anastasiia Bondarchuk

Easy Lens WebPrivate & Targeted Publishing

Easy Lens Web · Chapter · V2

Private & Targeted Publishing

The Preview & Upload dialog asking who can see the Lens, with Public selected.

Publishing a Lens meant publishing it to everyone. I wrote the proposal to let creators choose who sees a Lens, and pushed for it until it was built. Private publishing shipped. Targeting stayed a proposal.

Role
Wrote the proposal and pushed for it; sole designer of the shipped publish flow.
Team
Product, engineering and UX research
Timeline
V2 · after the Oct 2025 launch
Outcome
Private publishing shipped. Targeting stayed a proposal.

Problem

Publishing was public or nothing, so personal Lenses stayed in drafts.

Drafts were private, but you couldn't share them. So a Lens made for one friend's birthday had two options: the public carousel, or nowhere.

In a broader study of how creators used Easy Lens, they told us they'd love to share a Lens only with friends, or keep it to themselves. Public or nothing was one reason they sometimes didn't publish at all.

The publish screen at V2 launch: name, tags and payouts, with no choice of who can see the Lens.
V2 at launch

My part and the team's

I proposed private publishing, pushed for it and designed what shipped.

The research was a team study, run with our UX researcher. The problem came out of it.

My part was the proposal and the design. I wrote the product proposal, took it to our PM and head of engineering, and kept raising it in every meeting until it was scoped in. Then I designed the publish flow that shipped. Engineering built it, and the team decided the scope of the first version.

What I proposed

Choose who sees a Lens when you publish it.

The idea was to move publishing from "share with everyone" to "share with the right people". That could be a birthday Lens for one friend, an inside joke for a group chat, or a Lens for a wedding or a campus event.

AudienceStatus
Public (as before)Shipped
Private: anyone with the link or SnapcodeShipped
Specific friendsProposed
A specific group chatProposed
A location (geo-fenced)Proposed

Decisions and tradeoffs

Ship the smallest version first

We chose
Private publishing only, for the first version. Creators choose Public or Private, and Private means anyone who has the link or Snapcode.
Why
The team wanted a first version out fast, and engineering capacity was limited. Private publishing needed no new way to pick people or places.
The cost
The group-chat and event use cases, the most specific ones in the proposal, had to wait.
What it still covered
The core problem. A creator could finally share a Lens with just the people they chose, by sending them the link.

What shipped

Private publishing shipped a little after the V2 launch.

I redesigned the publish flow around private publishing:

Visibility

Creators pick Public or Private inside the existing upload panel.

Recreated interaction, sample data.

Upload and share

After publishing, the creator gets a link, a way into My Lenses, and one-tap sharing to other apps.

Recreated interaction, sample data.

Change preview

Creators pick or record the preview people see before they open the Lens.

Recreated interaction, sample data.

Outcome

Creators finally had a choice.

Shipped. Creators choose Public or Private when they publish, and a private Lens reaches only the people who have its link or Snapcode. Targeting by friends, group chat or location stayed a proposal.

Next chapter

Lens Components

The AI builds a Lens as a stack of components. I designed the layer that makes each one editable.

Shipped