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Quick Start Guide

Sign In and Ask Your First Question

Complete a real task in Curated in under 15 minutes — sign in, write a prompt, get an answer you can share.

Last updated May 11, 2026

This quick start gets you from zero to a shared answer in Curated. By the end of it, you'll have signed in, written a real prompt, refined the result, and saved the output to a dashboard or export.

Time to complete: ~10–15 minutes For: new users on a workspace that's already provisioned

Before you start

Prepare a real question you'd like Curated to answer. The more specific, the better. Examples:

  • "Find competitor coffee shops within a 10-minute walk of our flagship store on Main Street."
  • "Show me census tracts in Travis County where median income grew more than 20% between 2018 and 2023."
  • "Compare hospital coverage between zip codes 29201 and 29205 for trauma centers within 15 miles."

Step 1 — Sign in

Your workspace lives at <your-org>.curated.chat. Confirm the exact URL with your admin if you're not sure.

  • Open your workspace URL in a browser.
  • Click Sign in → use SSO (Google / Microsoft / Okta, depending on your org's setup) or a one-time email code.

If you can't sign in, check:

  1. You're on the right subdomain. app.curated.chat will redirect you to a get-access page — that's the wrong URL for an existing org.
  2. Your admin has invited your email. Curated workspaces are invitation-only.
  3. Your SSO provider is correctly configured. Reach out to your admin if SSO loops or errors.

Step 2 — Set your profile

Open Settings → Profile from the sidebar.

  • Default region / jurisdiction — sets the geographic frame Curated assumes when you don't specify one. Set it to your team's main area (e.g. "Texas", "Northeast US", "South Carolina").
  • Preferred units — imperial or metric. Curated honors this when generating responses.
  • Industry / use case — helps Curated tune phrasing and surface layers relevant to your domain (retail, healthcare, public sector, real estate).

You can override any of these in a single prompt: "answer in metric"* or "focus on Florida only."

Step 3 — Write your first prompt

Click into the prompt bar at the top of the workspace.

Anatomy of a good prompt

A useful Curated prompt has three pieces:

  1. The question — what you want done. Find, count, compare, route, summarize.
  2. The scope — where to look. A city, a buffer distance, a named dataset, a custom polygon.
  3. The filter — the attribute constraints. Population, revenue, distance, date, density.

Example:

Find Starbucks locations within a 10-minute drive of zip code 78701 that opened after January 1, 2022.

That has all three: question (find Starbucks), scope (drive-time buffer around 78701), filter (opened after a date).

Step 4 — Add context

Below the prompt bar, click Layers to select which data Curated should use:

  • Your organization's ArcGIS layers (if your admin connected ArcGIS Online or Enterprise)
  • Public datasets Curated has curated (Census, OpenStreetMap, ArcGIS Living Atlas)
  • Files you upload directly (CSV with addresses, a shapefile, a GeoJSON)

You can select up to 3 layers for a single prompt. Curated will pick the right combination automatically if you select more.

Tip: if you're not sure which layer to pick, leave it on Auto — Curated will route the question to the layer that best matches.

Step 5 — Run it and read the answer

Click Ask Curated. You'll see:

  1. A short explanation of what Curated is doing.
  2. The map renders with the result highlighted.
  3. A Sources panel on the right showing exactly which layers and operations were used.

If the answer looks off, scroll the sources. Most "wrong answer" cases are actually "wrong layer" — Curated picked a different dataset than you expected.

Step 6 — Refine via follow-up

Treat the answer as a starting point, not a final result.

  • "Narrow to locations open on weekends only."
  • "Add a 5-minute drive-time buffer instead of walk-time."
  • "Compare the result against last year."
  • "Export this as GeoJSON."

Each follow-up runs against the same map state. You're conversing, not starting from scratch.

Step 7 — Save the work

When you have something useful:

  • Pin to dashboard — adds the map as a widget you can return to or share.
  • Export — GeoJSON, CSV of attributes, or PDF report.
  • Share link — sends a read-only URL to a teammate (subject to your workspace's access policy).

What's next

  • Read Getting Started with Curated for the full feature tour.
  • Read Managing Workspace Access if you need to invite teammates.
  • Browse Release Notes to see what we've shipped recently.

If you get stuck

  • The first answer is often broad. Use follow-ups instead of rewriting the prompt from scratch.
  • If Curated says "no data available," try widening the geographic scope or relaxing the filter.
  • If you need a layer Curated doesn't have, ping your admin to connect it from ArcGIS Online or upload a file directly.
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