I'm currently updating the sorting options for a list of items. At the moment each option can be selected as descending or ascending which really doesn't mean anything in most cases (or is very unclear) e.g. organise by popularity (asc) or popularity (desc). Is that most popular first or last? Who knows.
This is the list in question:
If you look at it for long enough you can probably figure out what each option does, or else you have to just try them all out until you find one that you're after.
My suggestion what be something more like:
Sort by
Popularity (most popular first) or Popularity (least popular first)
Rating (highest first) or Rating (lowest first)
But this makes the line items very long. Would it be unconventional just to write the phrase e.g.
Sort by
Most popular first or Least popular first
Highest rated first or Lowest rated first
Are there better options, is there some best practice that I could follow? I've found a real mixed bag of implementations across the web and they're often no better.