Reaching Saturation

How do you know when to stop?

We discussed the research that our group has been working on. Two students are looking through the App Store and Google Play Store for apps and gathering up their desriptions, pricing, app purpose, and reviews. We also have been creating a presentation of screenshots of the apps so we can easily compare their UIs. I’ve been looking at apps that specifically target ADHD (for task management and not symptamatology) and specifically use AI (AI is in the title or description). Another student was scraping Reddit posts to gather information about users with ADHD and write up a collection of user personas.

I was getting the feeling that some of the information was becoming repetitive. I said “I could keep looking at apps and reading more in the book (How to ADHD) but the same themes are coming up. Perhaps I could have stopped sooner, and have all the information I have now”. Just how many apps do you need to analyze before you feel like you have a comprehensive analysis of them?

The answer is “Not all of them!” because this isn’t a systematic review.

The professor’s response was that we are “reaching saturation.” I didn’t consider it that way, but when she said that, I was immediately reminded of my Research Methods class. I expressed concern about having enough testers for the app. “Should I start asking now for volunteers to test the app next year?” The professor explained how you don’t actually need that many testers. You get diminishing returns at a certain point.

I asked ChatGPT to give me a picture of the graph I was thinking of so I can visualize this concept. This was the best I could get before I ran out of image creation calls.

It sounds like we are reaching saturation. On Tuesday we should synthesize this information so we can move forward. A student expressed that they would be willing to keep going on with the web scraping but was concerned if we should keep doing that. We don’t want to waste time doing something unnecessary!

I expressed that I like what we’ve got here and I’m looking forward to testing as soon as possible. I was sold on the whole testing early idea in lean and agile methodologies.

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