This paper focuses on the New Product Development Process (NPDP) area to contribute to increasing the productivity of CAD users by means of an improved design intent communication using a social-annotation technique. Design teams operate in a similar way to an online social network, and CAD models are not just only a 3D geometry representation, as they reflect the result of an specific modeling strategy, that usually constrains the future capability for modification and reuse of the existing 3D model. Considering this context, this work tries to assess the impact of annotations in the engineering change process in order to determine its influence in the user performance during this process. Preliminary experimental results obtained from several experiments with Spanish CAD students indicate that it is possible to reduce the time needed to perform engineering changes in existing models into a 10-20% range, if those CAD models provide annotations explaining the original design intent.