The notorious "Hamburger Menu" () is now showing up more and more on large desktop and laptop screens. The actual navigation menu that summarizes the site structure requires clicking on it to show.
My experienced intuition tells me most people familiar with small touch screens understand the "hamburger menu pattern", and they understand that navigating the site will involve pushing that button.
My intuition also tells me there's lots of users with big screens that don't understand the pattern (or don't notice/click on the hamburger icon).
This is a fast moving issue. I do think the ratio of people that understand and access the hamburger icon is growing. The number of sites that use the hamburger icon on big screens is growing.
Without a doubt you pay a price for hiding your nav menu behind an icon, but what is that price? Any studies on that? Like an A/B test, site A shows the nav menu, site B shows a hamburger icon, A will get more clicks down into the site, but how many more?
I'm looking for any relevant modern statistics.