“A brand is a promise, and the design either keeps it or breaks it.”
Behind every document eFax® helps move, there is a person waiting for something important to happen. A patient needs access to treatment. A family is applying for benefits. A business is finalizing an agreement. In those moments, every part of the experience has to earn trust. It has to be clear, secure, and reliable.
For Joe Jordan, UX leadership is ultimately about earning that trust. His career has spanned agency work, digital lending, government healthcare, enterprise design systems, and product design at eFax. Across each chapter, the same principle has remained constant: when people hand technology something that matters, the experience has to keep its promise.
We spoke with Joe about the experiences that shaped his approach to design, the role of AI in the creative process, and the opportunity to make complex document workflows feel more human.
Your career has taken you across digital lending, government healthcare, enterprise design systems, and now UX leadership at eFax. Looking back, what connects those different chapters, and what has continued to draw you toward complex problems at scale?
The thread is trust. I spent years on the agency side at JK Design and WPP, leading branding, UX, web, and commercial direction for brands like Verizon, Pfizer, Merck, and J&J. That is where I learned that trust is the whole game. B2B or B2C, a brand is a promise, and the design either keeps it or breaks it. At Citi, it was people’s money. In government healthcare, it was their benefits and their records. Here, it is the documents that keep hospitals, law firms, and agencies running. Different industries, same moment: somebody is handing over something that really matters to them, and they need the experience to just work. When the stakes are that high, every screen has to earn its place. I love that pressure.
Was there a specific project or moment that changed how you personally define good design?
Government healthcare rewired me. Before that, I thought about design the way most of us do in consumer tech. If the experience is bad, you lose a click or you lose a customer. Then I watched what happens when a confusing form stands between a real person and a benefit they are legally entitled to. They just give up. Nobody calls to complain. They simply do not get the help. After you see that, “good design” stops meaning clever or beautiful. It means nobody gets left behind because we were sloppy.
UX and product teams are often encouraged to move quickly and experiment, but healthcare organizations operate within strict regulatory and security requirements. How do you balance the drive to innovate with the responsibility to create experiences that are safe, reliable, and trustworthy?
I stopped thinking of compliance as the enemy a long time ago. It is part of the brief, just like the brand or the deadline. The trick is being honest about where you actually have room to play. The interaction, the language, the flow? Experiment all day. The parts that touch patient data or an audit trail? Those need to be boring and bulletproof, and boring is a feature there. Once the team agrees on which is which, speed and safety stop fighting each other.
When you began looking more closely at eFax®, where did you see the greatest opportunity for design to improve the experience of receiving, reviewing, and acting on important documents?
What surprised me was how much happens after a document arrives. Receiving it is the easy part. Then someone has to read it, pull out what matters, maybe sign it, maybe route it, usually on a deadline, and sometimes with a patient waiting. We already have the pieces. eFax Clarity turns a messy fax into structured data. jSign handles the signature. The design opportunity is making all of that feel like one motion instead of a handoff between tools. When that gap closes, people stop thinking about the software and just get their work done.
You’ve been an advocate for bringing AI into the design process itself, not just the products you build. What first excited you about that shift, and what has it made possible for the team that wasn’t possible before?
The thing that hooked me was speed to truth. An idea used to live in a deck for three weeks before anyone could touch it. Now, it can be a working prototype by the end of the day and in front of real users by the end of the week. More ideas get tested, and fewer get argued about in conference rooms. There is also a nice symmetry with what Clarity does on the product side, taking something raw and unstructured and making it useful, fast. My team spends way more time on judgment and craft now, and way less on grunt work. That is the whole point.
As you help shape the UX practice at eFax, what standard do you hope it sets for the way technology should support the people who rely on eFax every day?
I hope it sets the standard for care. Behind every document we move, there is a person counting on it. A nurse sending records so a patient gets the right treatment. A caseworker helping a family access benefits. Someone signing the paperwork for their first home. When we design with those people in mind, the technology does its job quietly, and they get to focus on what actually matters: the patient, the family, the milestone.
That is what excites me about the road ahead. 30 years of trust built eFax, and now we get to honor that by making every experience feel effortless, human, and worthy of the moments people trust us with. I cannot imagine a better standard to reach for.
Joe’s perspective offers a reminder that technology is rarely the most important part of the story. The real measure of an experience is whether it helps someone move forward without unnecessary confusion, delay, or friction.
As eFax continues to evolve, that principle creates a clear standard for the work ahead: design experiences that earn trust, support the people behind every document, and make complex processes feel simple when the outcome matters most.
Originally published on LinkedIn.