It is important to establish clearly thought out goals before you start your project. Goals are the basis for strategy and decision making for you entire project and research will help build criteria that help accomplish them. Sometimes user research will reveal information that may modify some of your initial goals. The important thing is to have a set of goals to help focus your thought process.

For example, the goal of this site is to teach people how to design and build websites. Through talking with people who will be using this site and observing their behavior, criteria were established requiring information on planning your site to be included on my site. With that in mind, it is now a criterion of my goals to ensure emphasis on planning and utilizing that plan for the entire site.