Wikimedia Apps/Android/Navigation

In Q1 of 2016, the Android team plans to re-imagine the navigation experience in the app. Specifically, we'd like to move away from using the "hamburger" menu, and instead surface the most-used features in the app in a more simple and straightforward way.

Goals
The ultimate goal is to improve user retention in the app, as well as user engagement while using the app (i.e. more time spent per session). Our hypothesis is that a smoother and more integrated experience will lead to better engagement by facilitating discovery of features and a greater diversity of content.

The case against the Hamburger menu
Until recently, the Hamburger menu was the accepted paradigm for navigation in Android apps, as well as in many websites. However, designers have been increasingly critical of this method, for the following reasons:


 * Because the hamburger menu is hidden by default (it requires a click to be revealed), any feature placed in that menu is no longer as discoverable as it can be. The more important the feature, the less it makes sense to place it in the hamburger menu.
 * The hamburger menu encourages a "kitchen sink" mentality. It encourages developers to create features without being mindful of how the features interrelate with each other, which leads to a disjointed experience. It's easy to pile a new feature into the hamburger menu, but it's much better to truly integrate the feature into the experience of the app.

First steps
Let's try to force ourselves to imagine what the app would look like without the hamburger menu. Or, more specifically, imagine how it would look if the features of Feeds, History, Reading lists, and general browsing were combined into a single screen in the app. We can take a few lessons from the current iOS design, as a jumping-off point.

Questions

 * Will we use a tab bar across the top (or bottom?) to switch between the different features?
 * What will this mean for tabbed browsing, as it currently exists in the app?
 * Will there be changes to how Search is integrated? (can we have a floating Search bar?)