Context
I recently hit my one-year mark at Noon Minutes, working on everything from fast-paced campaign creatives to core product experiences inside the Minutes app.
Early on, I got thrown into a pretty open-ended challenge — rethinking the home page hero, one of the most valuable spots for discovery and merchandising, with no existing pattern to work from. That blank slate turned into an opportunity to reimagine what that space could really do.
That exploration became Hero Widgets — a flexible system that takes the hero section from a static banner and turns it into a full-on dynamic merchandising platform for the Minutes ecosystem. 🚀
Problem
The Noon Minutes home page is one of the most critical surfaces for driving product discovery, campaign visibility, and revenue impact. However, the existing hero section relied primarily on static banner formats, which were limited in both flexibility and performance.
Banners typically delivered low engagement (CTR ~0.5%–1%), largely because they communicated only a single message and offered minimal interaction. This constrained the ability of merchandising and marketing teams to effectively utilize the most valuable real estate on the home page.
Key limitations included:
Low engagement due to passive, static banner formats
Limited product discovery, requiring users to navigate deeper into the app
Brands being less interested in running campaign at banners due to poor engament
Lack of flexibility to support seasonal campaigns, brand takeovers, or multi-offer promotions
Solution
We designed Hero Widgets with MxN layout support — a modular system that brings flexible, multi-entry merchandising to the hero section. Instead of a single banner, the hero area now supports multiple tiles in configurable grid layouts, so teams can highlight categories, campaigns, products, and offers all at once.
What a hero-widget can do?
Hero-widget can single handedly create 10+ variations of visual merchandising, to power these kind of permutations, we have baked few functionalities in our component
1
Product discovery
Hero widgets can surface curated product cards right on the home page, so shoppers can browse and add items to their cart instantly — no extra clicks needed.
2
Support for MxN widgets
MxN Hero Widgets let you split a single hero space into a grid of tiles (like 2x2 or 3x2). Each tile links somewhere different — a category, collection, campaign, or offer — so you can pack more into one spot without cluttering the page with extra modules.
3
Flexible layout configurations
Hero widgets come with 8+ layout combinations, so you can arrange tiles in whatever grid works best for your campaign. They're reusable, easy to adapt, and give teams the flexibility to experiment with how content looks — without rebuilding from scratch each time.
4
Theming support
Hero widgets have built-in theming, so you can tweak the look — backgrounds, colors, fonts, tile styles — to match any campaign, season, or brand moment, all without changing the underlying structure.
5
Interactivity
Hero widgets aren't just static banners — they can include interactive elements like swiping or toggling between themes, and even gamified mechanics that users can play with right on the home page, making campaigns feel more alive and engaging.
Impact
Hero-widget can single handedly create 10+ variations of visual merchandising, to power these kind of permutations, we have baked few functionalities in our component
$40K
incremental ad revenue per day
2x
GMV contibution as compared to banners
