An experience sampling app for iPhone

What experience sampling is

The experience sampling method was developed by psychologists, among them Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi and Reed Larson, in the 1970s. People carried pagers that went off at random times, and at each signal they wrote down what they were doing and how they felt right then.

Because the moment is chosen for you, the answers describe your day as it is, not as you remember it in the evening. Small things that memory smooths over, like how often you’re actually outside or who you spend your afternoons with, start to show.

How ObserMe does it

• Write a question and set it to At random. Choose how many times a day it may ask and between which hours, for example three times between 9:00 and 21:00.
• ObserMe splits those hours into equal parts and picks one random moment inside each, so the questions spread across the day instead of bunching together.
• Answer from the notification: Yes or No, a number, or a 1–5 scale, usually in a few seconds. Other answer types open the app in one tap.
• Questions at a set time live in the same list, for habits that belong to a fixed moment.

Questions that work well at random

• Are you outside right now?
• Where are you working from?
• Who are you with?
• Mood, from 1 to 5.
• Are you doing what you meant to be doing?

Questions about what you’re doing, where, with whom and how it feels suit random moments. Questions about whether you did something today suit a set time.

What you get back

Over weeks and months, the answers turn into reports for a week, a month, chosen days or the whole year: how often each answer came up, averages for numbers and scales, and which choices you picked most. A missed question is just a moment without an answer. There are no streaks to break.

Good to know

• ObserMe is for observing yourself. It isn’t a research platform: there are no study participants, consent flows or researcher dashboards. You can download your own answers as JSON at any time.
• It needs an account (email and password), so your answers survive a new phone. The privacy policy explains where they’re stored.
• It’s free for now, with no ads.
• Missed Reporter? ObserMe is built on the same idea.