Currently the buttons for changing sort order use up/down arrows for labels. In some cases this can be a bit ambiguous.

The UX might be improved by using contextual labels based on the field type. For instance when sorting by date order options would be "Newest first" or "Oldest first". When sorting by text options could be "A→Z" or "Z→A", and so on. The arrows can remain as a fallback for any field types that do not specify labels.

The only drawback to doing this is that the controls would likely need individual rows which will make the view options panel a bit larger. To mitigate this we might consider increasing the overall width of the panel, or even switching to a modal interface.