Sodium ion batteries are a topic of emerging interest, as the low cost and high natural abundance of sodium precursors provide a specific advantage over commercial lithium ion batteries. Comparatively, sodium chemistries suffer from lower operating voltages, making the development of suitable high voltage positive electrodes key to enabling sodium chemistries capable of direct replacement for modern lithium ion storage devices. Herein, we investigate dis/ordered nickel doped manganese spinels (NaxMn2-yNiyO4) as a positive electrode for sodium ion battery applications. Due to the kinetic limitations of the sodium de/insertion reaction into Na1-xMn2-yNiyO4 the effect of both temperature and the electrochemical cycling window are studied revealing a unique reaction pathway and potential optimization routes for further study. (C) The Author(s) 2016. Published by ECS. This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License (CC BY, http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits unrestricted reuse of the work in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. All rights reserved.