Guided Experience Platform

Who They Are

Inception Group is one of London’s most imaginative hospitality brands, known for creating immersive, story-driven venues that blur the line between dining, theatre, and experience. From the whimsical world of Mr Fogg’s to concept-led bars and restaurants, everything they do is built around atmosphere, narrative, and detail.

This project focused on a new direction for the group: self-guided experiences hosted inside their venues. The goal was to let guests take part in hands-on activities — like calligraphy — guided entirely through their own phones, without disrupting the ambience of the space. No instructors talking over guests. No audio. Just beautifully crafted visuals, subtle guidance, and seamless technology working quietly in the background.

The result needed to feel less like a website and more like an extension of the venue itself.

What I Did

My role was to build a bespoke Guided Experience Platform that could deliver step-by-step experiences through a mobile-first, app-like interface — while remaining flexible enough to scale across multiple Inception Group brands and venues.

The platform was built in WordPress using a fully custom ACF-driven architecture, allowing each experience to be structured as a series of steps, each with its own media, copy, and progression logic. The system supports both video-led steps and image-only steps, with intelligent layout behaviour to ensure users always understand there’s more content to explore below.

A key focus was UX in a real-world environment. Guests access the experience via QR codes, so the interface needed to load fast, feel native, and stay out of the way. I implemented a Progressive Web App (PWA) setup so experiences can be added to the home screen and launched in full-screen mode, removing browser UI and reinforcing the “this is part of the venue” feeling.

Visually, the platform was designed to strictly follow Figma designs — from gold typography and bespoke SVG navigation icons to carefully aligned step headers, host profiles, and progress indicators. Everything was built mobile-first, with desktop intentionally loading the same mobile layout to preserve the intended experience.

Behind the scenes, the system is brand-skinnable. Fonts, colours, icons, and UI behaviour can be swapped per brand without rebuilding the platform, making it future-proof for additional concepts beyond Mr Fogg’s.

This project was a great example of where WordPress shines when pushed properly: not as a generic CMS, but as a flexible application layer powering a very specific, carefully crafted experience.