Today in a post from Office Blogs, Microsoft’s Sway application is given a great spotlight from the company Man Made Music. MMM creates sonic identities, branding, and visceral experiences, and they company used Sway to help combat a growing concern in the medical industry.
What are sonic identities or branding? To provide a little background on MMM, sonic identities are sounds, music, or scores that we associate with a given product. It takes all of 2 seconds to hear the beginning trumpets of the Star Wars theme song to know exactly what it identifies and to even bring up fond memories of Empire Strikes Back. Even the beginning tone of Microsoft’s Windows operating system is a sound many of us can recognize. MMM works to create such identifying marks for many brands and products.
Taking that knowledge and experience working with various organizations, MMM set out to shed light on a growing concern in the medical industry and used Microsoft Sway to tell the story. If you’ve spent any time in a hospital, then you know there are an increasing amount of ambient noises, beeps, and alarms that come from the various pieces of equipment in a medical room.
MMM created a Sway project to talk about the concerns of being constantly exposed to this noise and the effects it can have on patients, as well as hospital personnel. The project was titled “Alarm Fatigue” and highlights the concerns of patients and hospital staff when effected by the constant noise of machines throughout the day.
MMM chose to use Microsoft Sway for its flexibility and power in building stories. Three key areas that MMM enjoyed about Sway were Collaboration, Curation and Customization.
Collaboration allows multiple people to work on one Sway without any hiccups or issues with applying information. Curation is a great feature to Sway where it begins to suggests images and/or information to apply to your Sway, based on what you have already entered. Think of Curation as a friend giving you added suggestions to your project, as you continue to build it. Customization allows for the changing of themes, colors and areas like transitions between slides and subject matters.
Sway is a cloud-based application that works to give you a blank canvas (or Sway) to create your story. Utilizing cloud storage, a user is able to quickly grab file from various sources like OneDrive and use those to build their project. Because Sway was designed from the ground up to be web and cloud-based, users who view Sway’s will get tailored experiences for whatever devices they are on. This eliminates any concern of formatting issues when sharing your Sway with an audience, across multiple devices.
With this latest project, how do you see Sway helping in the creation of stories to share? Let us know in the comments.
