Cheque mates: participatory design of digital payments with eighty somethings

This paper describes a project exploring the design of digital payment services in collaboration with 16 people aged over 80. Many older people find cheques valuable as a means of payment but the UK Payments Council recently proposed their abolition. We describe two designs that simultaneously aimed to preserve and augment the paper cheque as a means of making electronic payments. These were devised during participatory design workshops through critical dialogues with our eighty something participants. Workshop discussions resulted in the creation of a real world cheque system where we issued pre-paid cheques without the involvement of banks. This work informed the development of a digital cheque book based on Anoto digital pen technology. The work illustrates the value of participatory design with 'extraordinary' users, such as the eighty somethings, in HCI.