For the development of automobile lighting components, various designers, developers and manufacturing personnel are involved, each group needing different software tools. In this Smartlite project, several software tools were developed far product development of the lighting components and then tested using two different user interfaces (UIs); the first was based on a commercial CAD system (SDRCI-DEAS) and the second was based on a web browser. The specific focus of this study was a comparison between the new web-based UIs, and the UIs on commercial CAD systems. The usability data have been collected from the users at Visteon and showed that the web-based UIs provided comparable functionality with the CAD-based UIs in terms of performance and usefulness. For the criteria of accessibility, the web-based tools out-performed the CAD-based tools.