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Cheque Mates

This double-blind refereed paper describes a project exploring the design of digital payment services in collaboration with sixteen people aged over 80. Many older people find cheques valuable as a means of payment but the UK Payments Council recently proposed their abolition largely because they are expensive and time-consuming for banks to process. Blythe and others 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 with participants.

Workshop discussions resulted in the creation of a real world cheque system where Blythe et al issued pre-paid cheques without the involvement of banks. “Cheque Mates” books were pre-paid up to the value of £20 to act as their ‘payment’ for participating in the workshop, the payees mailed cheques they received to a project team-member who would then transfer the money to their bank account. This work informed the development of a digital cheque-book, utilising Anoto digital pen technology normally used to record note-making. The digital cheque-book was designed to look and feel like an ordinary cheque-book, the use of the digital pen and specialised paper linked to a PayPal account demonstrated the possibility of a cheque-book which would allow older people to make digital payments without directly using computers.

It was featured in broadsheet and tabloid newspapers and also featured on Radio 4.

CHI is the leading HCI conference and the acceptance rate for 2012 was just 23%. The paper has been cited 10 times already and the research was discussed at a special event in Westminster on the 27.2.12 organized by the International Longevity Centre (ILC-UK) and funded through the sponsorship from the UK Payments Council. Delegates included representatives from the banking industry and both Houses of Parliament.