Fishway design not only takes into account the swimming abilities of target fishes, but also considers the hydrodynamic characteristics within the fishway. In this study, the flow fields of one vertical-slot fishway (i.e. VSF), five T-shape fishways (i.e. TSF-1~TSF-5) and two H-shape fishways (i.e. HSF-1 and HSF-2) are numerically simulated by solving the three-dimensional Reynolds-averaged Navier-Stokes equations and the K-Omega-SST turbulence model. The numerical results clearly indicate that the hydrodynamic properties of HSF-2 are overall superior to the remaining seven cases, in terms of the time-averaged flow pattern, the time-averaged velocity magnitude, the depth-mean timeaveraged velocity magnitude along the vertical-slot section, the volume percentages of the time-averaged velocity magnitude less than some critical values, and the distribution of the time-averaged turbulent kinetic energy. Therefore, HSF-2 is more friendly for fishes with relatively smaller sizes and weaker swimming capacities to transfer upstream. The novel HSF-2 is firstly proposed in this paper, and it is naturally designed during the process of improving the flow regime. Furthermore, the generalizability of the superiority of HSF-2 over VSF and the original T-shape fishway (i.e. TSF-1) has been exhibited with the aid of the numerical results of four operating conditions (i.e. Q = 400 L/s, 600 L/s, 800 L/s and 1000 L/s).