Even if you’re not a designer, I highly recommend reading Luis Abreu’s brilliant, GIF-filled deep-dive: Why And How To Avoid Hamburger Menus. Here’s the summary of his analysis plus several other studies and some context about how this is playing out across the most popular apps. 

What’s The Answer? Usually A Tab Bar.

The tab bar is a row of persistently visible buttons typically at the bottom of the screen that open different parts of the app.

Instead of hiding the navigation options in a drawer, you splay them out. This keeps users from forgetting they exist, makes multiple pieces of core functionality available with one tap, allows rapid switching between features without the need to retreat to the app’s homescreen, and lets you display notifications on each tab.

What you sacrifice is a bit of screen real estate, but it’s probably worth it. An A/B test by mobile appzeebox presented by The Next Web show just how damaging these drawbacks can be to an app’s engagement rate. Six months ago zeebox tried switching from a tab bar to a hamburger, and saw its metrics drop. Recently, it ran a simultaneous A/B test on the two navigation schemes and found the tab bar drove a 55 percent average weekly frequency of use, and an 8.7 percent higher average daily frequency.