One early concept for the usage indicator was a color shadow that appeared under the notch. We decided it was too noticeable so we made an adjustment that eventually landed it on the small circle in the top left corner of the screen

We did not iterate that much on batch notifications throughout the process and the core of the concept stayed the same from start to finish

We experimented a lot with many different ways to implant this feature. The design we landed on was one that fit into Apple’s Human Interface Guidelines and felt like it could exist in iOS11