Previous: Rewind the word
Cool, cool, cool. But what words did we use at the end of all that? Let’s check it out!
Here’s the main flow
This screen was only around for our beta. I want to give the amazing John Saito credit, as this was based heavily on copy he wrote for a different beta. 
This little call out points you toward the new feature. Also notice the link: “Rewind this folder.” 
Rewind is a bit of a nuclear option, so we wanted to direct people to other ways of getting stuff back (there was more testing for this portion, but I won’t get into that here). 
Once you Get started, step 1 is picking a day. The activity graph can help you determine when a lot went wrong. 
People had some trouble pinpointing the right time, so we added some helper text once you move over the graph 
Once you pick a date, that text near the button appears. We found this helped people feel confident about clicking to the next step. 
We needed to define how to list every action (e.g., rename, added, deleted) in this timeline, so I also put together a metadata guide style guide for our engineering team. 
Once you start to hover, you’ll see the message about choosing which actions to keep. 
Once you pick a date, we’ll continue referencing this date and time through the rest of the flow. 
You can see that “go back to before stuff went wrong” mood coming through here. 
Here’s my take on the classic cancel confirmation conundrum—if you’ve ever written one of these you’ll understand why I said Back and not Cancel. 
We want to make sure you know what to expect. 
Those random gray boxes are actually an animation 😉 
That’s it! You’re done!
Something went wrong
Rewind also has a number of errors and empty states. Folks going through this flow are already dealing with something stressful, so I tried to be careful about how we handle these unexpected situations.
A general temporary error: Problem (prefaced with couldn’t) + solution. 
For error messaging, I tried to give the impression that Dropbox was right there with you trying to help you through the flow. 
Here’s that same problem + solution formula. With a dash of hand holding. 
Some stuff we can’t rewind. Notice the Can’t rewind some content link. 
If you click that can’t rewind link, we’ll give you some general details here. 
Once you get to the end of your history, you can’t go any further back. We had an amusing discussion about farther vs. further here. Do you think we got it right? 
I tried to keep this empty state messaging clear and conversational so it wouldn’t get in the way. 
Here’s the week view using similar language as the day empty state. 
Rewind is a premium feature. That means upsells. These aren’t my specialty, but I did try to inject some of tone we settled on.
Words by Nik 