The European Union has "extended and relaunched" UsabilityNet, which seems to be somewhat like the EU counterpart to the across-the-pond usability.gov.

There are a couple points that struck me about the EU version. First, I liked their tabs. I think the jury is still out on whether a tabbed metaphor is the best choice on the web (much has been said about Amazon's real-estate-grabbing version). But UsabilityNet is at the right size that their tab does double-duty, providing both primary and secondary level navigation, complete with "where am I" and "where am I mousing" cues. Here's a snippet:

Another really interesting component to their site is the section called Usability for Managers. This kind of effort suggests to me that, while it's cool that the CHI folks are working with the AIGA folks (see DUX2003), it might be even more productive if we could get the AIGA ED folks working more closely with the "big" usability crowd (the ones who focus on UCD, the process, rather than "little" activities, such as testing). More about this later!

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