From 2019 through 2021, I managed development of Yours Truly, James Deering, an interactive archives project at Vizcaya Museum and Gardens. The project began with a simple audience question—who was James Deering, and why did he build Vizcaya?—but answering it required changes far beyond a single interactive.

Note: This post reflects my own professional experience and perspective. It does not represent an official position of Vizcaya Museum and Gardens.

Deering left no memoir and relatively little public self-explanation. What survives in abundance is correspondence from the years when Vizcaya was being built. Those letters and telegrams were rich with personality, conflict, taste and decision-making, but they were largely inaccessible to visitors. Yours Truly was designed to let audiences encounter Deering through his own words while making their own judgments about who he was.

Human-centered design changed the starting point

The project emerged from Vizcaya’s participation in a Knight Foundation human-centered-design cohort. Early prototyping surfaced two especially strong audience desires: visitors wanted to know more about Deering’s personality and motivations, and they wanted access to archival material that was not visible in the museum or online. That reframed the work. Rather than beginning with a technology and deciding what to put into it, the team began with audience questions and worked backward toward the systems needed to answer them.

The interpretive approach deliberately avoided prescribing a single reading of Deering. Correspondence was grouped into themes such as relationships, building, business, enthusiasms and legacy, but visitors were encouraged to move non-linearly and build their own impressions from the evidence.

A project that kept becoming infrastructure

To make the experience possible, Vizcaya digitized more than 3,000 pieces of correspondence, established an archives digitization plan, added storage, built a responsive WordPress-based storytelling framework, installed visitor wireless access across much of the Estate, developed a visitor-research system called Personamatic, and connected letters to 3D models, 360-degree views, video, timelines and other media.

The project report is revealing because the “interactive” occupies only part of it. Just as much space is devoted to content mapping, digitization workflows, metadata, file storage, testing, wireless connectivity, project management, staff skills and platform decisions. The visible experience sat on top of a much larger organizational build.

COVID changed the delivery model

The original concept leaned heavily on kiosks located throughout the museum. The pandemic made that model impractical almost immediately. The team shifted toward a bring-your-own-device experience triggered by QR codes, which meant responsiveness and reliable visitor Wi-Fi became central rather than secondary.

That pivot was consequential. Vizcaya had already purchased kiosks, but the project could continue because the content model was not locked to those devices. The browser-based architecture became the more durable layer.

Testing the interpretation, not just the interface

UX testing compared multiple ways of helping visitors read dense historical correspondence on phones. One test compared a magnifying-glass treatment with an iMessage-style scrolling interpretation. Testers were asked to complete tasks from the letters, describe frustrations and explain what they expected from the experience.

Other tests shaped the names of thematic categories and revealed how visitors characterized Deering in their own language: “risk-taker,” “perfectionist,” “book lover,” “all business,” “art aficionado,” and even “exasperated by incompetence … I can relate!” Those responses mattered because they demonstrated that visitors were doing the interpretive work themselves rather than merely repeating a label supplied by the museum.

What happened

By spring 2021, the project report recorded roughly 50–100 onsite visitors per day accessing the experience, with remote use from the United States, Europe, Asia and Africa. The digitized correspondence was also uploaded to Wikimedia Commons with structured metadata; the report later identified Commons as a major referral source whose visitors stayed longer and consumed more content than other referral audiences.

That last outcome is especially important. The archival files did not remain trapped inside the custom experience. They entered an open public-knowledge system where they could be found, downloaded and reused independently of Yours Truly.

The project was larger than the product

In hindsight, Yours Truly was less important as a single interactive than as a bridge from product development to platform thinking. It advanced archives digitization, visitor research, sitewide connectivity, reusable storytelling components, open access through Wikimedia Commons and a staff practice of testing audience-facing work before treating it as finished. Those capabilities directly informed later projects, including Beyond Vizcaya.

The project report described Yours Truly as technically a prototype but also as a foundation for “transformative digital infrastructure.” That is a fair description of what happened. One audience problem forced several institutional systems to mature together.

Project documentation

The full project report documents the design process, digitization, technology choices, audience testing, project management and implementation in much greater detail.

View the Yours Truly Project Case Study on Scribd.