Recently, I had a conversation with a startup  around the concept of making it easier for customers to adopt their product. The question is how you reduce the fear, uncertainty and doubt (FUD) for customers around not just buying but integrating your product or service. I’ll demonstrate this by way of example.

EXAMPLE: I am sitting on a Southwest flight last night from LaGuardia to Midway. I am engrossed reading a Wired article on my iPad when a loud noise startles the crap out of me. But oh, it’s just the wing flaps extending in preparation for landing. But are they normally that loud? Everyone besides me is looking anxiously around as well. Maybe it’s just because I am sitting over the wing? For a few seconds, a wave of fear, uncertainty and doubt crosses my mind.

Keep in mind. I am an experienced flier. At one point, a United pilot on the JFK-SFO run would call me by my first name. Yet, my experience on my flight was soured by a few seconds of panic. Even though flaps successfully deploying is a good thing and Southwest didn’t do a damed thing wrong, Southwest’s brand was subconsciously tarnished in my mind and all the folks around me who were looking nervous.

When designing products we often spend an incredible amount of time on the tangible and visible. In the airplane example, I am sure product designers spent lifetimes of effort making sure the seats are comfortable yet safe and space efficient, redesigning the engines in multi-million dollar wind tunnels to make them 5% faster or more fuel efficient. Why do all this again? Oh yeah, to serve your customers better and thus make more money. Sometimes to improve your product you need to get inside the head of your customer and understand the underlying psychology.

To make the product better, start with the customer, find the psychological insight and then go back and tweak the product.

In this example, my customer insight is that people are afraid of flying. In a post-September 11th world where there are crazies trying to blow planes up with their freaking shoes, this fear is even more pronounced in the public psyche. This seems like a fairly intuitive insight and it is, yet I don’t see a single US airline addressing it. The difference between good and great products (and companies) is operationalizing these insights.

Many flights already have personal television displays on every seat with a channel that shows your flight status on a route map. In the short-term, how about another channel that tells you in simple and reassuring terms what is going on and prepares you for it?

“We are 25 miles from the airport and have begun our descent to Midway. In approximately 60 seconds you will hear the plane’s wing flaps start to deploy as the pilot slows the plane down to a safe landing speed…Next, you will hear the plane’s landing gear deploy beneath you…Midway Air Traffic Control has instructed us to circle the airport for 20 minutes. The plane will be banking to the left as we circle. Our approximate planned flight path for the holding pattern is: [map].”

This is just one example of how to address this customer fear. I am sure there are better ones out there. But the point is that if you were to make every person who ever shot a nervous glance around an airplane 25, 50 or 100% more comfortable, you’d probably boost revenue more than many direct “product” improvements which would likely be more costly. Customers would find flying more relaxing, less taxing and would have better memories stored in association with the brand of airline on which they flew. This increases customer loyalty and turbocharges profitability.

How do you take these lessons and apply them to your startup or company? Perhaps the reason more customers aren’t buying or using your product is not because of the lack of features X, Y and Z (even though they explicitly ask for them!) but because they fear setting it up, figuring out when to use it in their daily life, because your claims seem too good to be true based on their prior experience with crappier products or because they fear they won’t get enough post-sales support. There are a million possibilities for customer FUD. All it takes is some careful research and an open mind to find these barriers to purchase/usage and transform them into competitive advantage.

Microsoft just announced the pricing scheme for upgrading from various flavors of Windows 7 to other flavors of Windows 7 through the “Windows Anytime Upgrade (WAU)” program. For Microsoft customers, this comes as a relief as it should make life much easier in scenarios such as the following:

One day you decide to purchase a new, sweet looking Dell Mini 10 netbook with Windows 7 Starter. A few weeks later you are reading personal email via Gmail (Internet Explorer), on Twitter (TweetDeck) and listening to music (iTunes), when all of a sudden you realize you missed an important business meeting with Katy Perry and Tay Zonday on the topic of how to solve world hunger because Outlook never served you with a “Meeting Reminder” because you already had three applications open. This would obviously force you to smash your teeth in requiring a long hospital stay and painful oral surgery. Following your release from the hospital you may say to yourself “Hey, self. It might be nice to upgrade that piece of crap Windows 7 Starter edition to something that’s actually functional. Why the hell didn’t Dell warn me about this in the first place? I might still have some of my natural teeth if they had done that.” After an hour on hold with Dell, a Dell sales representive finally picks up and tells you to hang up and call Microsoft and inquire about the “Windows Anytime Upgrade (WAU)” program.

NOW, aren’t you glad Microsoft established this program? Isn’t it fucking convenient? You’re damned right it’s convenient. You can upgrade ANYTIME. Not just on Tuesdays or alternating Saturdays like with all those other operating system manufacturers. Is Caldera or Tandy forcing you to upgrade your OS on weekdays from 9am-5pm? With Microsoft you can upgrade from Windows 7 Home Basic Starter Premium Small Business (Northeastern US) 2009 Edition to Windows 7 Prosumer Advanced Home Theater CE Touch Tablet at 4:30am on a SUNDAY! Yes, you read that right. On a SUNDAY! Anytime. Daylight savings time, Christmas Eve, Boxing Day, while you’re in the shower–wait, actually–anytime, except anytime you want to upgrade from say Window 7 Starter directly to Windows 7 Professional or Ultimate. That’s just unreasonable and impossible. You’re an asshole. That’s what you are.

It seems extremely straightforward, but just in case you’ve missed anything or are more visually inclined, I’ve gone ahead and provided a chart for my readers.

And please remember that there’s no official way as of yet to go from Windows 7 Starter to Windows 7 Ultimate or from Windows 7 Starter to Windows 7 Professional outside of buying two upgrade packages. Also unknown is how one might move from Windows 7 Professional to Windows 7 Ultimate.

Let’s look at the pricing plan for OS X upgrades now: $29.

Sometimes I wonder if the Product Marketing and Management folks at Microsoft have any say at all in the things they make. (Is that statement too Marxian for you? Scary, eh?) Perhaps there are just so many people and layers of management that even when they know something such as their pricing is an impending train wreck more than six months from launch, they can’t do anything to correct course. So who does makes deicisions like this inane pricing scheme? Most folks would say “Clearly, a committee.” But I know the real answer. There’s actually one man at Microsoft who made the decision. I hear he calls all the shots in Redmond these days. His name is Clippy.

Parting thought–what about the pricing of this upgrade path?

If I post this graphic on that official Windows 7 Blog, do you think they’ll respond?