GOL New App

The problem: a critical product with too much friction

The previous GOL app had to support one of the most demanding digital environments in consumer products: aviation. Unlike simpler transactional platforms, airline apps depend on highly complex integrations, multiple operational rules, external systems, and constant edge cases. In practice, that means even small experience flaws become major sources of stress for travelers. Users repeatedly reported friction in key moments of the journey, especially around performance, reliability, and post-purchase management. Actions that should feel simple, such as finding a trip, reviewing details, buying baggage, changing seats, checking in, or understanding flight status, often became confusing or unstable. The app did not consistently support the full travel lifecycle with the level of clarity and resilience users needed.

This became even more critical because airline journeys are inherently high-stakes. Travelers are often dealing with deadlines, airport logistics, family members, connection windows, special assistance, international rules, or partner-operated flights. In that context, poor information architecture and unclear interactions are not minor usability issues, they directly affect confidence, decision-making, and perceived service quality. The redesign was not just about making the app look better. It was about rebuilding a core digital product so it could support complex aviation scenarios with more clarity, consistency, and operational intelligence.

The approach: redesigning the app around real traveler needs

The project was built using Tangerina Design System, which provided the visual and structural foundation needed to align experience quality across GOL’s digital ecosystem. But the real challenge went far beyond interface consistency. The central approach was to redesign the app around the traveler’s real needs across the full journey: understanding the product quickly, booking with confidence, managing trips without confusion, checking in with less stress, and receiving timely information while traveling.

This required looking at the product not as a collection of isolated screens, but as a connected travel system. Each flow had to work individually, but also had to connect smoothly with the others. Search affects acquisition. Acquisition affects trip management. Trip management affects check-in. Check-in affects boarding and live flight follow-up. The experience only works when the entire chain works together.

Another important decision was to treat complexity as something to be translated, not exposed. Aviation has unavoidable business rules, technical constraints, and operational variables. The role of design in this project was not to eliminate that complexity, but to absorb it and turn it into clearer interfaces, more predictable steps, stronger messaging, and more resilient self-service experiences.

The scale of the work reflects that complexity. Across nearly a year of work, more than 1,000 Figma screens were produced by a team of five designers, with strong design leadership and close collaboration throughout the process. My contribution was especially focused on leadership, organization, quality direction, experience consistency, and guiding how Tangerina should be applied across the app, while also working directly on several flows and hypotheses.

Home and onboarding: making the product easier to understand

One of the clearest issues in the previous app was that many users simply did not understand how to use it well. That made the first interaction with the product especially important. To address this, the new app introduced a lightweight onboarding flow designed to quickly explain key value points, reduce uncertainty, and help users understand how the app could support their travel experience. Language selection was brought into the opening experience as well, which was essential given that not all users downloading the app were Brazilian or Portuguese-speaking.

The home experience also went through extensive exploration. More than 20 hypotheses were studied before arriving at the final structure, and the home itself took around a month of iteration before the team had enough confidence in the direction. The result was a screen designed not only to support trip management, but also to strengthen discovery and sales.

Instead of behaving like a purely utility-driven app, the new home balances account access, travel search, promotional content, and key ecosystem services such as Smiles and GOLLOG. This helped reposition the product from a tool used only after buying a ticket into a platform that could also stimulate acquisition and broader engagement from the first screen.

My Trips: redesigning one of the most critical and complex flows

Trip management was one of the biggest pain points in the previous experience and one of the most demanding workstreams in the redesign. On its own, the “My Trips” area generated more than 300 Figma screens to cover the full breadth of scenarios involved. The challenge was not just to show a trip, but to make every relevant action easier to access and understand regardless of how the booking had been made. Travelers could purchase through GOL directly, through agencies, or through third-party channels, and still expect the app to become their main point of control afterward.

At the center of this experience was the travel card, one of the most strategic components in the product. It had to communicate multiple pieces of critical information at once: traveler identity, booking code, route, departure date and time, flight number, operating airline, and available next actions. It also had to support actions such as buying baggage, changing seats, checking in, opening the boarding pass, or managing the trip in more detail.

Around that component, the flow had to support a large number of variables: direct flights, connecting itineraries, stopovers, codeshare scenarios, international travel, one or multiple passengers, children, adolescents, babies, and different booking states. Search and retrieval logic also had to support booking code, airport origin, and last name combinations. The redesign transformed a fragmented and often stressful area into a more structured self-service experience. Instead of making users decode airline logic on their own, the app worked harder to organize details, surface next steps, and reduce ambiguity.

Booking flow: turning complexity into a guided purchase journey

The acquisition flow was another major workstream, with more than 200 Figma screens dedicated to booking scenarios alone. This was one of the flows where I worked more directly in execution, prototyping, and solution development. Booking a flight seems simple on the surface, but in practice it involves layers of business rules, user decision-making, pricing logic, and operational exceptions. The redesigned flow had to support one-way, round-trip, and multi-city journeys, along with date selection, passenger configuration, stopover logic, and promotional code use.

Passenger setup introduced another layer of complexity, since categories such as babies, children, and adolescents are governed by airline rules that affect what combinations are allowed and which information needs to be collected. The experience had to preserve those requirements without making the process feel bureaucratic or overwhelming.

After search, users moved into flight selection through structured cards, followed by filtering and sorting tools to help narrow options according to preference. Fare selection was redesigned to improve clarity around benefits and trade-offs, using expandable structures and deeper comparison points so travelers could make more informed decisions. From there, the journey continued into passenger review, accessibility and assistance declarations, seat selection, baggage and extras, and finally checkout. Payment needed to support multiple methods, including credit card, Pix, and GOL Smiles card scenarios, while also providing a strong sense of purchase review and confirmation.

The overall goal was to reduce the cognitive burden of a naturally complex transaction. Rather than forcing users to navigate a dense airline process, the new flow broke decisions into clearer steps, with better hierarchy, stronger guidance, and a more reliable sense of progression.

Check-in: reducing stress close to departure

Check-in is one of the most time-sensitive moments in the aviation experience, and that alone changes how the flow needs to be designed. Unlike generic digital forms, check-in happens when the traveler is already close to departure and often operating under stress, distraction, and urgency. The redesign brought check-in closer to the surface by exposing the action directly from the travel card. This reduced navigation effort and made the flow feel more immediate and contextual. But behind that apparent simplicity, the journey remained highly complex.

The flow needed to support standard check-in, group travel, automatic check-in, special passenger conditions, pets, standby scenarios, international trips, codeshare operations, facial biometrics, boarding pass recovery, and even check-in cancellation. In addition, it required strong messaging across security items, baggage rules, dangerous goods, and operational restrictions. More than 20 dedicated screens were created just to handle error states, warnings, and critical information.

This work shows one of the main qualities of the redesign: the team did not only design ideal-path experiences. It also designed for friction, exceptions, and recovery. That is essential in airline products, where service quality depends as much on how the system handles irregularities as on how it supports happy paths.

My Account: giving users more control without support dependency

The account area was less complex than My Trips, acquisition, or check-in, but still represented a major opportunity to improve user autonomy. More than 100 screens were created to cover this area properly. Previously, users often struggled to manage their own personal data, saved travelers, preferences, payment methods, and mileage-related information. In some cases, that led to unnecessary dependency on support channels for tasks that should have been simple self-service interactions.

The redesign organized this area into a clearer management space, where users could review personal information, update password and address details, manage travelers, configure app preferences, follow updates, handle preferred payment methods, and access privacy, cancellation, refund, and support information. Even though these are quieter product areas, they matter because they reduce operational friction over time. They help the app become a practical everyday tool, not only a transactional product used in isolated moments.

Flight Status and Live Activities: bringing the journey into real time

One of the most relevant new features introduced in the redesign was Flight Status integrated with Live Activities. This did not exist in the old app and responded to a growing user expectation shaped by other real-time products such as ride-hailing and delivery apps. Travelers increasingly expect their digital services to stay present during important stages of a journey, not disappear after the purchase. The new app addressed that by bringing flight updates closer to the user through dynamic cards and persistent status surfaces across mobile devices.

The Live Activities component was designed for Android, iOS, and smartwatches, adapting information to each stage of the trip. Depending on context, it could surface route, gate, boarding group, seat, timing updates, delay information, and other essential details. If users needed more depth, they could move from the dynamic layer into the full Flight Status area inside the app. This feature extended the app’s value beyond transactions and management. It made the product more present in the live travel moment itself, when information becomes most valuable and time sensitivity is highest.

A large-scale product transformation

This was a long and demanding project, involving nearly a year of work, a multi-designer team, extensive iteration, and a very high volume of interface production done entirely before the current wave of AI-supported acceleration. The process required continuous revision, alignment, prioritization, and problem-solving across many fronts. What makes the project especially significant is not only its scale, but the breadth of its impact. The redesign improved a core digital product across onboarding, discovery, booking, trip management, account control, check-in, and real-time travel follow-up. It also brought GOL’s new design language into one of its most visible and complex user experiences through Tangerina.

The result was a substantial improvement in how travelers interact with the brand digitally. App ratings improved, satisfaction increased, praise became more visible, and major pain points in core journeys were significantly reduced. The roadmap remains extensive, as any serious aviation product does, but the redesign established a much stronger foundation for the future of GOL’s mobile experience.