> the emotional experience trumps the direct navigability of the site itself
Users don't come to a website for an emotional experience, they come to use the tool to do something. Emotional experience never trumps usability, ever. The only emotional experience sites with bad usability have is user anger at not being able to figure out how the damn thing works.
The usability of what? Not a glib question -- if your goal is to give the user a feeling which results in them clicking a signup button or going through another flow you've got laid out, why would you want to muddy that up with a nav bar?
For a lot of sites, "Get started" is the #1 thing you want people to do from the homepage. We've known forever that removing distractions from register/checkout/PPC pages increases completion rates -- if you look at your homepage as another page that needs completions then this makes perfect sense.
> if your goal is to give the user a feeling which results in them clicking a signup button or going through another flow you've got laid out
And if your usability is so bad they can't find that button, the site sucks. Emotional feelings always come second to usability. Landing page usability is all about selling the user on a call to action, but they have to be able to find that call to action, that's the usability part. I didn't say anything about nav bars, I said usability. Beyond that, your users don't care to or want to be emotionally manipulated; you might want it, your business might want it, but the user don't care about that, they care that they can find the information they're looking and/or accomplish the task they came there for.
Well, if the entire point of your site is to let people get started, ok, remove all navigation.
But if it's useful for something else, like if there's an actual product in it somewhere, with actual features, or if there's actual content somewhere you'd want your visitors to read, it's good to give them the option of doing anything besides "getting started".
> The usability of what?
> why would you want to muddy that up with a nav bar?
Typically people are looking for information when the visit a brand new site. If the user can't figure out how to get that information, chances are they're going to be frustrated, and have no interest in clicking the button.
Users don't come to a website for an emotional experience, they come to use the tool to do something. Emotional experience never trumps usability, ever. The only emotional experience sites with bad usability have is user anger at not being able to figure out how the damn thing works.