The present disclosure involves system, methods, and media for displaying and exploring software object relationships in an interactive manner. In general, complex structures can have relationships between objects, such as parent/child relationships, general associations, and dependencies. Additionally, some objects may have multiple dependencies. For example, an object representing “low battery” may be a child object for both a screen failure object and a GPS failure object. The n-column explorer allows for exploring relationships between objects of arbitrary categories and in hierarchies of arbitrary depth, without the need to duplicate objects. For example, the “low battery” object need not be duplicated for both the GPS failure and the screen failure.