Donner le pouvoir des patrons de conception d'ihm aux developpeurs logiciels via les modes de presentation: Une application aux logiciels de controle de simulateurs de vol

Flight simulators are a blend of sophisticated hardware and software systems. They are intended to train and keep pilots of civilian or military aircrafts up-to-date in safe and economical conditions. User interface design for flight simulators is a complex and expensive process whose difficulty is increasing along technological innovation: touch interactions, multiple monitors, multiplayer simulations... Several building trades take part in this endeavor: human factors engineering experts as well as software developers, the latter lacking formal usability training.;In this thesis, we carry out various studies among CAE Inc. in order to set up a design pattern library and make it accessible to both software developers and usability practitioners.;We started by studying and comparing the most popular user interface design pattern libraries. We then wrote thirty design patterns covering flight simulator control software of all kinds, building upon our review of literature and field work at CAE. Those patterns have then been privately shared on the intranet network of the company via an open-source content management system, tweaked to fit our needs. They have thus been read, used and validated by around fifty CAE professionals, including the human factors engineering team.;We subsequently developed new ways of presenting those patterns to software developers: application types, decision trees and patterns previews. Those presentation modes were compared to a reference presentation mode during a test session in the company. Participants were beginners that had never used user interface design patterns and had no prior knowledge of CAE's pattern library. Our results show that software developers find 1.5 to two times more relevant patterns with the new presentation modes, while being in average 50% more satisfied. However, those gains come at the expense of speed since search durations increase up to 50%.;The control and optimization of the design process go through knowledge management. Design patterns are formal generic solutions to recurring design problems; they seem especially suitable to take on this challenge. They are however being written by and for human factors engineering experts, hence hard to use for software developers that are therefore denied a profitable tool. Making user interface design patterns available to software developers is a sparsely studied topic; no strategies have yet been defined to this end.;Even though our experimentation has a limited scope, we can recommend the use of alternative presentation modes in user interface design pattern libraries.;Those results are summed up and turned into recommendations for immediate use in a professional environment. Complementary actions for technical and organizational matters are suggested.