elearningpost talks about building experience into elearning:

For example, a logically well-laid building plan might fulfill a functional need but not necessarily the experiential need. The functional needs could be space, plumbing, electrical etc., and the experiential need could be privacy, character of a space, mood it evokes, ambience etc. For elearning to fit into today's consumption, its design too needs to be crafted for experience.The paper contends that thinking only about the functional aspects of elearning hampers our experience outlook. It identifies strategies to overcome this conflict and to successfully engage today's learners. Through a range of examples from diverse areas such as print, documentation, presentation, and elearning, the paper illustrates how deliberate attempt to think beyond mere functionality, makes an obvious difference to the experience of the output. The cues from these examples provide directions to build elearning products that are functionally sound and experientially engaging.

What does this mean for elearning?

Psychologist Alice Isen and her colleagues have shown that positive experiences are critical to learning, curiosity, and creative thought. She discovered that people who felt good were more curious, better at learning, and were able to come up with creative solutions (Isen, A. M. 1993). The scope of design therefore, should extend beyond functionality to fulfill the need for experience.

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The constraints on the designer and the expectations of the learner create a gap that is difficult to bridge. A designer thinks a great deal about what his product will be like, but the environment in which his product is consumed might change. Likewise a designer cannot control the development of expectations in the learners’ minds. The designer can only control the product.This difference often leads to a layout-experience gap. A brilliant design fails because of a failure to pay adequate attention to small but decisive details that shape the final experience. To elaborate on the point, let’s consider a parallel example from architecture and understand what it implies for elearning. A logically well-laid building plan might fulfill aesthetic and functional needs but may not necessarily fulfill the experience-needs. The needs that may be taken care of by an architect might be things like space, services, etc. But the architect might still miss on experience needs like privacy, lighting, ambience, etc.When a building-plan is thought of as a layout-plan one sets a certain standard for building-design. But when this layout is translated into experience, it can get far away from the expected standard. Design should be understood not as layout, but as the translation of layout into experience.