Beam - Escooter Sharing

Quick to set up and easy to use. Affordable transportation, especially if you live far from the metro or bus stop. Fair prices, they don’t steal your money if their equipment doesn’t work either. If your ride is less than 30 seconds, they’ll ask what went wrong and charge you 0tl

Using Beam started off well enough, though I almost immediately realized it was more expensive than a taxi I would take to some areas of Kuala Lumpur. Sometimes Beam was cheaper but not always. My biggest issue with the service happened yesterday. I got to my destination and the app crashed. Thought nothing of it, and tried to reopen it. It just kept crashing. Having seen this with other apps before I deleted the app and reinstalled it. However, because I was not on WiFi while outside and I didn’t have a local sim or number, the app was super slow to download. During this time I could not end my ride and was paying for periods when the scooter was idle and parked. I also had to awkwardly monitor the scooter while running my errands because the scooter would be left on. As a Lead UX Researcher/Designer, the scooter and app suffer from core design challenges and lack of understanding as it pertains to heuristics and system design. The scooter itself should have an easy way to end the ride should a customer run into an issue, and there are several that might involve one’s phone. I couldn’t find a number on the scooter to call live support, or report an emergency. To end the ride I had to park in my hotel entrance, ask a security guard to watch the scooter, while I ran upstairs and let the app properly download on WiFi. It opened immediately and wasn’t crashing. I then went back downstairs, took it to a parking spot and was able to finally end the ride. In yet another incident but less problematic than what I shared above, the scooter started to slow down and was throttling my speed on a sidewalk, when I had just used the same sidewalk but in the opposite direction. I had done this many times without an issue on previous rides but for whatever reason it was an issue in the particular area I was in that day. I’m conflicted as to whether I would use a Beam again here. Motorbikes and taxis are more cost effective, (day rates can be as cheap as a single Beam ride) or cheaper by destination for a one way taxi ride.

I feel it’s pretty wasting my time to take a photo of it to make sure where it locked and located. The problem is that when I lock it, the apps gets slower than unlock it and add do ride time. I think it’s unfair. I have been experiencing frozen screens on my phone many times especially when I try to unlock it. And takes another time to take a photo. The point of using this service is to cut down my time but it isn’t. Please make this apps more smoothly without having a frozen screen which makes me turn off the apps.