Currently I'm designing an android app that has 4 main menus without extra sub-menus (just simple menus like Home, My Loans, History, Settings). This app is a financial product to help users acquire loans. I thought that having a side menu like Gmail will be a more pleasing layout than having a fixed bottom menu like Instagram where each menu needs an icon and label.
Any advice for the menu placement?
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Dear Google, it is nice but I insist that the bottom navigation does not work well on Android devices because of the system buttons. When I ask about 15 Instagram users on Android devices, they declared that they often click on system buttons accidentally when operating with bottom menu.
https://medium.com/house-of-apps/bottom-navigation-issue-on-ios-android-and-ux-8851ffe7260
It is a failure in terms of user experience when user accidentally exits the application. As a product team, do we want the user to leave the application?
Facebook used bottom navigation bar on Android for a while, but they did not get positive results in the tests and turn to tabbed structure.
I would suggest you use the side menu, or do a little user testing with Floating Bottom Hamburger Menu to help people access the menus with their thumb. Similar to Google's plus icon -
science to it?
My inner designer supports hamburger menu because they can be designed soooo pretty - just look at all the dribbble shots (actually don't look at dribbble for UX related matters). But, unfortunately, it doesn't work for the user that good!
Not only many users don't recognize the hamburger, it also slows down the task completion process.
Here are just a couple of articles relating to your question: https://www.nngroup.com/articles/mobile-navigation-patterns/
https://www.nngroup.com/articles/hamburger-menus/
But there are literally thousands of articles supporting this claim.
Hamburger menu is usually located on the upper left-hand side, but only 10% of the world population is left-handed (according to Wiki). And as the screens gets bigger, it's getting a lot harder to reach that part of the screen. Which, again, slows down the task completion time.
There are a couple of factors why people are veering away from the hamburger menu.
Here's one of many articles about that: https://lmjabreu.com/post/why-and-how-to-avoid-hamburger-menus/
If looking at it objectively, bottom menus are likely easier to navigate as opposed to hidden menus.
Number 1 example is the Facebook iOS app (i don't have an android). All of the main sections that the user needs (feed, requests, messages, notifications) are already displayed. Easier to navigate to and from sections. The last item is the menu, which contains items that are less likely to be visited by the user.
Still, it depends on your context whether which menu is best to use.
Considering that you have 4 main menus then it would be better to show those menus to user. Just like olegdeleon said that bottom menus are likely easier to navigate so it's more efficient and effective.
This article might be useful for you.
Side-navigation offers way more space to put items in while on the other hand top/bottom-navigation is very limited and at-most 4 or 5 items can fit (please be aware of smaller screens).
In our app we have quite some top-level navigation items (7+) and we use the side-navigation to display all of them and we use top/bottom-navigation to display the most prominent/used items in. This way users can access the most used top-level screens with a single click and less important screens using two clicks.
Example from the material design guidelines showing both:
On iOS this pattern is quite common but instead of using side-navigation for all the items the top/bottom-navigation has a "more" option. But for Android I would defiantly use side-navigation instead of a more option that takes precious space in the top/bottom-navigation.
As suggested by other answers bottom navigation on Android might lead to usability problems even though the area might be easier to reach by hand.
